data-licensing
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Adstra wants you to know who’s who.
One customer can look like five strangers in a marketing database. Adstra connects the dots - and lets brands decide how much to trust the connection.
MOTOR Information and the price of the wrong part
A Hearst newsletter became a business selling the details that keep repair shops and truck fleets moving. Its most revealing product is a relationship: this part, that vehicle, the right job.
Bobby Samuels Is Building the Market Behind the Models
AI has plenty of models and plenty of compute. Bobby Samuels is betting its next constraint is the stubborn, human work of earning access to the right data.
Stack Overflow
It started as two programmers fixing a broken internet for coders. Eighteen years and 83 million answers later, Stack Overflow is betting its human-checked knowledge is the one thing the AI boom can't fake.
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.
PolicyMap
PolicyMap is a Philadelphia-based cloud mapping and data analytics platform that lets anyone build custom maps, reports, and dashboards from more than 75,000 curated indicators drawn from 170-plus public and proprietary sources - no GIS expertise required. Spun out of the Reinvestment Fund, it serves banks, universities, hospitals, governments, and nonprofits that need to turn place-based data into decisions about housing, health, lending, and community investment.
Maggie McCullough
Maggie McCullough is the CEO and founder of PolicyMap, the Philadelphia-based mapping and data-visualization platform she launched in 2008. A former White House budget-office staffer turned housing researcher, she built PolicyMap after struggling to fit maps and data into her own policy work, betting that anyone should be able to make a map as easily as they shop online. The platform now serves universities, banks, health systems, nonprofits and governments, layering thousands of public and proprietary datasets into one searchable map. In December 2023 the company closed a $3 million Series A led by its former parent, the Reinvestment Fund.