Protege, a platform that facilitates the secure sharing of proprietary data for artificial intelligence training, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Footwork, with participation from CRV, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital, Shaper Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, and others.
This new capital follows the company’s $10 million seed round in 2024 and reflects growing investor confidence in its approach to enabling safer, compliant access to high-value data for AI development.
As AI models advance, access to high-quality training data remains one of the biggest barriers to progress. Protege is addressing this challenge by giving data owners a trusted way to license their proprietary datasets — such as video libraries, clinical notes, and audio files — to AI developers.
"Access to the right training data continues to be the biggest bottleneck to AI's progress," 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."
With the new funding, Protege plans to invest heavily in product development, expand into additional verticals, and grow its partnerships with enterprise clients and data providers. The company recently added Audio & Speech and Motion Capture as new verticals, reflecting a strategy to broaden its data offerings.
Following a 20x revenue growth in 2025, Protege is also aiming to extend its footprint across industries where access to real-world, domain-specific data is especially critical — including healthcare, media, and frontier AI applications.
Founded by Bobby Samuels, Travis May (CEO of Shaper Capital and former CEO of LiveRamp and Datavant), Engy Ziedan (Chief Scientific Officer), and Richard Ho (CTO), Protege offers a unique value proposition. It connects hard-to-reach proprietary datasets with AI labs and developers while ensuring data compliance and governance remain top priorities.
Protege’s platform is already used by over 100 data partners across industries. Its catalog includes access to 300,000+ hours of video, 500,000+ hours of audio, billions of clinical notes, and hundreds of millions of medical images — all available for training next-gen AI models.
“The richest data in the world — and the most important information for training AI — sits in proprietary data sets,” said Travis May. “We believe that safely unlocking this data is one of the single biggest opportunities to accelerate the pace of AI development..”
The Series A round was led by Footwork, with continued backing from previous investors like CRV, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital, Shaper Capital, and Liquid 2 Ventures. These firms have a track record of supporting early-stage companies operating at the intersection of AI, data, and enterprise technology.
“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.”
