For counsel: what to check before your client licenses business data.

1. What Topology Partners is and is not

• Topology Partners is operated by Hoyt Gong in Boston, Massachusetts. It reviews your client's company and tells it plainly whether there is a real licensing opportunity. With your client's written OK, it introduces your client to the buyer that fits. It uses that buyer's public referral program. Your client approves any offer and signs directly with the buyer.
• It is not a party to any license. It never receives, holds, de-identifies or moves your client's records. It is not your client's agent, cannot sign for it and gives no legal advice.
• It is paid a referral fee by the buyer your client signs with, never by your client. Each buyer's published terms, read October 24, 2026 unless noted:
  • micro1: $50,000 for deals up to $700,000, or 7.5% of deal value above that. $75,000 for a company that has shut down, on deals up to $1M. Paid by wire after micro1 has received and approved the data.
  • Mercor: 5% of the signed deal, up to $100,000. Individual listings set their own caps, currently $25,000 to $92,500. Paid after the company's first data delivery.
  • Scale AI: up to $50,000, paid only if Scale signs a partnership with the company.
  • Handshake AI: $10,000, paid once the company's data transfer is completed and accepted.
  • Turing (Project Lazarus): up to $10,000 when a referral “becomes a deal”, a term Turing doesn't define.
  • Replay: $10,000 or 10% of the company's upfront licensing fee, whichever is greater. Paid the day Replay pays the company. Read October 25, 2026. The operator is Replay Data, LLC, of Brooklyn, NY (a Sunset brand).
  • Grepped: 10% of the owner payment, capped at $100,000, with a 12-month non-circumvention term. Terms effective October 13, 2026.
  • Polyshares: no published referral fee. We disclose the fee in writing before any introduction.
  • Troveo: a marketplace with no referral program. It pays nothing.
• Your client pays nothing, and nothing is deducted from its contract. Before any introduction, we tell it in writing what the buyer pays us. It can strike any buyer. The same list, with links, is on our disclosure page.
• We sign a mutual NDA with your client before it shares even record counts. Ask each buyer for its own NDA before it scopes your client's data.

2. A license is not a sale

The license should set a defined scope and a fixed term, with your client keeping ownership of its data. The contract should require deletion of the raw dataset at the end of the term, with a deletion certificate. Models trained during the term stay trained; deleting the dataset doesn't undo training that's already done.

3. Clauses to ask every buyer for

• No transfer to entities in China or other countries of concern. The Justice Department's data security rule (28 CFR Part 202) restricts certain bulk transfers of sensitive personal data to countries of concern; please confirm whether it applies to your client's data.
• No resale or redistribution of the raw records.
• Use limited to model training and evaluation.
• De-identification obligations on the buyer, described in writing.
• Named competitors excluded as end customers.
• Non-exclusive, unless exclusivity is priced.
• Audit rights and a deletion certificate.

Some US data vendors have been reported to also supply training data to labs in China. If it matters to your client, we ask every buyer in writing for the same protections (no transfer to China or other countries of concern, no resale, deletion at term end). Only the buyer can agree to them, so they go in your client's contract, and any buyer that refuses comes off the list.

4. What your client should check first

• Customer and vendor contracts that restrict how your client may use their information.
• CCPA and other state privacy laws that may apply to its employees or customers.
• Its employee communication policy, and whether to tell employees before licensing internal communications.
• Recording consents for any call transcripts.
• Data covered by HIPAA, GLBA or ITAR stays out.

5. The buyers' public program pages

Each buyer publishes its own criteria, payout ranges and referral terms. We checked criteria and ranges on October 15, 2026, and referral terms on October 24 and 25, 2026. The buyers can change them at any time.

• micro1: data partnerships, company referral program and payout estimator
• Scale AI: data partnerships and referrals
• Mercor: data partnerships and referral program
• Handshake AI: data partnerships and estimator and referral program
• Turing: Project Lazarus
• Replay: referral program (read October 25, 2026)
• Grepped: referral terms (effective October 13, 2026)
• Polyshares: data licensing (no published referral fee)

Our disclosure page lists the referral fee each buyer publishes and the date we read it.

Contact

This page is general information, not legal advice. Questions: hoytgong@gmail.com. See also our Terms of use and Privacy policy.