Data-native capital is coming

Data-native capital is coming

There are trillions in the computers

Yoni Rechtman

Oct 23, 2026

17

5

1

Share

There are trillions of dollars hidden in the computers.

It’s expensed when created (doing the normal work of running a business), ignored on continuous operations (as it’s accumulated), and buried in goodwill (when acquired). Data has always just kind of faded away on balance sheets and in M&A pricing.

And yet, suddenly, the infinite petabytes are actually important/useful to a project that matters: training models. There’s gold in them hills!

We now know what it’s all always been for (training models!), which means it’s now practically, not just theoretically, valuable. The value of the data of any one individual company is highly varied, but in aggregate there is a huge amount of economic power locked away inside businesses/not accounted for on their balance sheets. It’s newly monetizable as an asset (and potentially as an ongoing income stream), which means it needs to be thought of more like a capital good. That is, data is or could be more like equipment or a treasury asset than brand.

The bear case is obvious: the budgets can’t last, data is non rivalrous, prices will get competed down as more sellers wake up. Maybe it’ll be synthetic data and simulation. All of which might be right. But whether or not the current mania continues, data is this is definitely valuable RIGHT NOW. There is undoubtedly a moment open for those who can seize it.

And there’s some good arguments that data selling (broadly defined as selling raw data, selling tasks, collecting human data, building environments, etc.) for model training will be around forever at increasing volumes AND levels of sophistication selling to more buyers (enterprises training their own models outside the frontier labs, etc). So if we let ourselves imagine an alternative path, things look really interesting/fun to speculate on.

Capital markets haven’t yet woken up to the opportunity to financialize the data sitting unaccounted for on balance sheets. Accepting that this is an asset, it will get financialized in a few different ways.

First, in being sold, we’re starting to establish market-clearing prices for data and its byproducts in various forms. Eventually, that will filter into book values/valuations and asset prices, which has a ton of near term arbs and long term opportunities for new capital structures that can take advantage.

If I’m right, this is the new junk bonds that will spur the new LBO.

Second, using data sales to fund or create opportunities for some other thing, or as a byproduct of that other thing, is a new type of business that is only just starting to emerge.

Businesses that create or capture unique data

You can even imagine companies being run as long horizon RL environments, continuously generating data/tasks/evals through their regular operations, creating a secondary revenue stream while they improve themselves through the AI they’re training/building.

There are lessons from history about accounting driving financial engineering and capital structure. This might be like the invention of junk bonds, which spurred LBOs. Or securitization, which transmuted piles of illiquid, one-off assets into liquid, legible assets.

We are at the start of a sea change in technofinance.

There are a number of new financial products and strategies that seem fairly obvious and are only just now emerging.

CAC

is among the most important early versions of this and I’m starting to see a lot of exciting ideas:

Cash advances against data sales through an emerging field of private credit vehicles

Hard assets that generate data which you can sell to invest in more hard assets

PE firms pre-seling l a target’s data before close to cover part of the price

Data contracts big enough to replace a funding round

Prediction markets and staked tokens for decentralized QA or cleaning

And if I’m REALLY right, it’s a much bigger deal than that, because it’s not just financial leverage (data-native capital structure) BUT ALSO operating leverage (business/earnings transformation). Data exhaust could be a new source of capital AND a new driver of business models, akin to advertising.

Being maximally creative/pushing this to its second and third order effects gets you to some weird places. But it’s clear that

there are/will be data-native business models and capital structures around financializing this hidden asset

.

data-native companies: business built around data as a valuable asset and fully incorporating that belief into their operating assumptions, like internet- or AI-native companies before them.

With all its tradeoffs and its indeterminate future, data creates substantial option value and new opportunities to be creative and entrepreneurial. It’s a new dimension for capital allocation: data allocation. Making the choice between keeping data internal vs. exposing it externally (and how) is akin to the choice between returning capital to shareholders and letting it compound (and how).

The best CEOs will always be brilliantly creative allocators.

Join us

Next month Leeor Mushin and I are hosting a dinner in NY for people building in the supply chain (researchers, data leaders, quants, etc.). Hit me up to attend or recommend someone who I should invite. This will be a small group of ≈10 people.

We’re also working on some larger events and programming for the winter.

17

5

1

Share