Data prices · Labs & life sciences

What AI labs pay for life sciences data

Health and life sciences data has the clearest public prices of any industry, mostly through Tempus, which disclosed a $200 million three-year data licensing and model development agreement with AstraZeneca and Pathos in 2025. Lab records, protocols and deviations from working labs are scarce, and patient data carries the strictest rules.

What buyers want

Records your team already keeps

Results with protocols

Assay results linked to the protocol and conditions that produced them.

Deviations and fixes

What went wrong in a run, how it was caught and what changed.

Longitudinal records

Data that follows the same subjects or samples over time, with outcomes.

Price signals

What public deals and research show

$200M

Tempus's three-year agreement with AstraZeneca and Pathos for data licensing and model development fees, to build an oncology foundation model (April 2025).

Tempus Q1 2025 results

$241.6M

Tempus's 2024 data and services revenue, which includes data licensing and related services.

Tempus FY 2024 results

These figures come from a company with millions of linked records and services bundled in. A single lab's records won't price like that, and no public per-record price exists for lab data.

The wider market

$203M

Data licensing contracts Reddit disclosed in early 2024, with terms of two to three years.

TechCrunch

$250M+

Reported value of News Corp's five-year content deal with OpenAI, including cash and credits.

Press Gazette

$10k-$100k

Per-company payouts for shut-down startups' Slack messages, tickets and email archives, across nearly 100 deals.

Forbes, April 2026

$200-$2,000

Typical price per reinforcement learning task, according to Epoch AI's interviews with people who build them.

Epoch AI, 2026

Pricing factors

What moves the price

Outcomes attached: Molecular or lab data linked to clinical or experimental outcomes is what the largest deals pay for.
De-identification method: Patient data must meet HIPAA Safe Harbor or Expert Determination before it can be used, or it stays out.
Approvals: Consent and ethics approvals that cover secondary use raise both value and speed.
Years of history: Longer runs of records show change over time and how outcomes played out, which a single year can't.
Rights you can prove: Buyers pay for data you own or are allowed to license. Data held for customers without their permission won't sell, so our calculator cuts the estimate when rights are unclear.

Our calculator

How we estimate life sciences data

Our indicative model starts from a base value per system for about five years of history at an 11-50 person company, then applies a sector weight of 1.6x, your history, team size and rights. It is an estimate we confirm on a call, not a market price.

System	Base value
Lab notebooks & LIMS	$60k
Docs, wikis & SOPs	$10k
Support tickets & chat	$15k

Recurring

Paid again every month

Labs produce new results every week. A refresh term turns each month's new results and deviations into another paid batch.

How recurring revenue works

Rules that apply

We leave patient data out unless it is already de-identified under HIPAA or anonymized under your existing approvals.

Source: HHS on HIPAA de-identification

Questions

Life sciences data, answered

Can we include patient data?

Only if it is already de-identified under HIPAA's Safe Harbor or Expert Determination method, or anonymized under your existing approvals. Otherwise we leave it out.

Is the Tempus deal a fair comparison?

It shows that buyers pay large sums for outcome-linked health data. A single lab's dataset is much smaller, so use it as a sign of demand rather than a price for your records.

What sells best from a working lab?

Results tied to their protocols, plus the record of what went wrong and how it was fixed. That history is hard for labs to find anywhere else.

Keep reading

Selling life sciences data

Data types

Selling lab notebook data to AI companies

Lab notebooks sell when they record full conditions and failed runs. How labs value them, what has to be removed first, and how a license works.

6 min read

Privacy and law

De-identification vs anonymization

De-identification removes or masks what points to a person. Anonymization means no one can reasonably identify them again. The law treats the two very differently.

5 min read