Protege, a platform for the secure exchange of proprietary data for AI training, has secured $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Footwork, with participation from CRV, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital, Shaper Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, and more.
Since its $10 million seed round in 2024, Protege has partnered with over 100 data partners in healthcare and media, generating significant revenue. The platform offers a vast catalog of AI training data, including over 300,000 hours of video, more than 500,000 hours of audio, billions of clinical notes, and hundreds of millions of medical images. Recently, Protege launched two new verticals: Audio & Speech and Motion Capture.
Founded by Bobby Samuels, Travis May, Engy Ziedan, and Richard Ho, Protege enables data owners to provide AI developers with secure access to their proprietary data. The Series A funding will be used to enhance product offerings and broaden partnerships with enterprise customers and data partners.
KEY QUOTES:
“Access to the right training data continues to be the biggest bottleneck to AI’s progress. Protege was born out of a belief that the next generation of AI breakthroughs will be powered by enabling data holders to safely allow controlled access to their data. This funding is a major milestone that enables us to deepen our product and partner even more closely with the organizations shaping the future of AI.”
Bobby Samuels, CEO and Co-Founder of Protege
“The richest data in the world — and the most important information for training AI — sits in proprietary data sets: rich human knowledge is embedded in content like videos, news articles, audio clips, medical images, textbooks, and many other proprietary sources. We believe that safely unlocking this data is one of the single biggest opportunities to accelerate the pace of AI development.”
Travis May
“We’re thrilled to back Protege in their mission to become the connective tissue between proprietary data and cutting-edge AI. The team has shown incredible execution since seed, with real traction across healthcare, media, and frontier AI labs. As more organizations look to build AI products grounded in real-world data, Protege’s platform will be critical to doing so safely and at scale.”
Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Co-Founder and General Partner at Footwork
