Protege, a platform designed to enable the secure exchange of proprietary data for artificial intelligence training, announced the close of a $25 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Footwork, with participation from existing investors including CRV, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital, Shaper Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, and others.
“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,” said Bobby Samuels, CEO and Co-Founder of Protege. “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.”
Following a $10 million seed round in 2024, Protege established partnerships with leading foundational model developers and AI companies, generating tens of millions in revenue for data partners. The platform currently works with over 100 data partners in sectors such as healthcare and media, offering an extensive catalog of AI training data that includes over 300,000 hours of video content, more than 500,000 hours of audio content, billions of clinical notes, and hundreds of millions of medical images. In the past week, two new verticals — Audio & Speech and Motion Capture — were launched to further expand market reach.
Protege was founded by Bobby Samuels, Travis May (CEO of Shaper Capital and co-founder and former CEO of LiveRamp and Datavant), Chief Scientific Officer Engy Ziedan, and CTO Richard Ho. The company collaborates with data owners across industries to make proprietary data accessible to AI developers in a secure and governed way. For AI builders, expertise in overcoming data fragmentation and sourcing rare data assets enables effective and efficient model development.
“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,” said May. “We believe that safely unlocking this data is one of the single biggest opportunities to accelerate the pace of AI development.”
After experiencing 20x business growth in 2025, Protege plans to allocate the Series A funding toward expanding product capabilities, entering new verticals, and strengthening partnerships with enterprise customers and data providers.
“We’re thrilled to back Protege in their mission to become the connective tissue between proprietary data and cutting-edge AI,” said Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Co-Founder and General Partner at Footwork. “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.”