Protege, a platform that lets companies securely share proprietary data for AI training has raised $25 million in its Series A funding round. Footwork led the investment, while existing backers including CRV, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital, Shaper Capital, and Liquid 2 Ventures also participated.
CEO and Co-Founder Bobby Samuels emphasized the significance of this milestone, stating that “access to the right training data remains the biggest bottleneck for AI progress. Protege was created to empower data holders to safely provide controlled access, fueling the next wave of AI breakthroughs.” Samuels added that the new funding will allow the company to enhance its product offerings and strengthen collaborations with organizations shaping AI’s future.
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Since raising $10 million in its 2024 seed round, Protege has partnered with leading AI and foundational model developers, generating tens of millions in revenue for its data partners. Currently, the platform supports over 100 data partners across healthcare and media sectors and maintains an expansive AI training data catalog. The collection holds over 300,000 hours of video, 500,000+ hours of audio, billions of clinical notes, and hundreds of millions of medical images. As part of its push to expand, Protege has rolled out two new verticals: Audio & Speech and Motion Capture.
Protege’s founding team Bobby Samuels, Travis May (CEO of Shaper Capital and co-founder of LiveRamp and Datavant), Chief Scientific Officer Engy Ziedan, and CTO Richard Ho focuses on safely connecting data owners with AI developers. By addressing data fragmentation and sourcing hard-to-find datasets, Protege streamlines AI model development while ensuring compliance and security.
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Travis May stressed the importance of proprietary data, saying, “Some of the most valuable and essential AI training information is locked inside proprietary datasets. Human knowledge embedded in videos, news articles, audio clips, medical images, and other sources is a major untapped resource. Unlocking it safely presents one of the largest opportunities to accelerate AI innovation.”
After experiencing 20x growth in 2025, Protege plans to use the Series A funds to deepen product investments, expand into new verticals, and scale partnerships with enterprise customers and data providers. Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Co-Founder and General Partner at Footwork, voiced his confidence in Protege’s mission: “As organizations work to build AI products based on real-world data, Protege will be key to making that development safe, scalable, and effective.”
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