Protege Targets AI’s Data Bottleneck With $25M Series A

Protege CEO Bobby Samuels had seen the same problem surface across AI projects: promising model ideas stalled because the right data never arrived, or arrived too late. The most valuable datasets, embedded with years of human expertise, were often locked away in private archives entangled in technical barriers. In early 2024, he joined forces with Travis May, a veteran of data-sharing ventures like LiveRamp and Datavant, to build a business around removing those obstacles. “Access to the right training data continues to be the biggest bottleneck to AI’s progress,” Samuels said in the company’s recent funding announcement.

Protege just closed a $25 million Series A led by Footwork, with participation from CRV, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital, Shaper Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, and others. The company says it grew revenue 20-fold in 2025, with tens of millions of dollars paid out to data partners through its platform. Nikhil Basu Trivedi, co-founder and general partner at Footwork, described Protege as “the connective tissue between proprietary data and cutting-edge AI,” citing its traction in healthcare, media, and “frontier AI labs.”

Structuring and Licensing Data for Hard-to-Fill AI Gaps

Protege’s platform serves as an intermediary, enabling data owners to make their proprietary datasets available for AI training under strict governance. The service handles the legal, technical, and operational steps that often delay or derail data-sharing agreements, from rights verification to structuring and annotation.

Since raising a $10 million seed round in 2024, Protege has built a catalog that includes over 300,000 hours of video, more than 500,000 hours of audio, billions of clinical notes, and hundreds of millions of medical images. The company now counts over 100 data partners, spanning healthcare networks to media archives.