This is interesting. I used to work for a mortgage start-up years ago. They built several products for banks and home builders, such as a mortgage vault and tools for signing mortgage documents online.
One condition I still remember was that bank customers required us to put our code in escrow, held by lawyers, in case the company went under. I always wondered if customers could rebuild the code, allocate more resources to develop and maintain it, or simply look for an alternative solution.
they came to us for our solution. I assumed they either couldn’t build it themselves or didn’t want to invest in a custom solution.
in my experience it has just been a way to help business decision makers credibly claim they are managing risk when buying from a startup