# Protege

> Protege is a New York-based AI data platform that connects owners of private, real-world data - hospitals, media libraries, motion-capture studios and more - with the AI labs and enterprises that need it to train, fine-tune and evaluate models. It licenses and curates proprietary datasets under strict privacy, IP and compliance controls, so data holders get paid and provenance is preserved. Founded in 2024 by Bobby Samuels and Travis May, Protege has assembled access to billions of clinical notes, hundreds of millions of medical images, and hundreds of thousands of hours of video and audio, positioning itself as core infrastructure for the post-web era of AI development.

- **Founded:** 2024
- **Headquarters:** New York, New York, United States
- **Founders:** Bobby Samuels (Co-Founder & CEO), Travis May (Co-Founder (Founder & CEO of Shaper Capital; co-founder of LiveRamp and Datavant)), Engy Ziedan (Chief Scientific Officer), Richard Ho (Chief Technology Officer)
- **Team size:** ~84 employees
- **Products:** Pre-Training Data, Post-Training Data, Fine-Tuning Data, Evaluation & Benchmarks, DataLab
- **Notable:** Grew business 20x in 2025, Reached ~$30M GMV in first full year of operation, Raised ~$65M total across Seed, Series A and Series A1 since 2024

## Products & services

- **Pre-Training Data** — Massive, diverse real-world datasets across industries used to train foundation models at scale.
- **Post-Training Data** — Narrower datasets for supervised fine-tuning and human feedback (RLHF-style) alignment.
- **Fine-Tuning Data** — Curated, domain-specific datasets that adapt general models to specialized use cases such as healthcare.
- **Evaluation & Benchmarks** — Uncontaminated, real-world data for testing and benchmarking model performance, including a partnership with Vals.ai.
- **DataLab** — Analytics platform (datalab.withprotege.ai) for exploring and working with Protege's data catalog.
- **Healthcare Vertical** — Access to 3B+ clinical notes and 100M+ medical images, de-identified and governed for AI use.
- **Video Vertical** — 300K+ hours of licensed video content for multimodal model training and evaluation.
- **Audio & Speech Vertical** — 500K+ hours of audio across 50+ languages for speech and audio model development.
- **Motion Capture / Spatial & Physical Intelligence** — Motion capture and sensor-based datasets for robotics and physical-world AI.

## Achievements

- Grew business 20x in 2025
- Reached ~$30M GMV in first full year of operation
- Raised ~$65M total across Seed, Series A and Series A1 since 2024
- Aggregated access to 3B+ clinical notes, 100M+ medical images, 300K-500K+ hours of video, and 500K+ hours of audio across 50+ languages
- Signed 100+ data partners across healthcare, media, audio and motion capture
- Attracted a16z as a lead investor within roughly 18 months of founding
- SOC 2 certified

## Latest updates

- **2026-01** — Raised $30M Series A1 led by Andreessen Horowitz, extending the Series A and bringing total funding to roughly $65M.
- **2025-08** — Announced $25M Series A led by Footwork; launched Audio & Speech and Motion Capture verticals after 20x growth in 2025.
- **2024-09** — Emerged from stealth with a $10M seed round led by CRV and launched its AI training data platform.

## Links

- Website: https://withprotege.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/withprotege/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/withprotegeai

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/protege
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-18