Shofo is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator W26) building what it calls the world's largest indexed video library - a 'Common Crawl for video.' It continuously crawls billions of public short-form clips from platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, then runs them through a pipeline that sanitizes, deduplicates, segments and labels footage with object detection, activity recognition and reasoning annotations. Shofo sells custom, ready-to-train datasets to AI labs, delivering a request like '100K hours of cooking videos where someone is holding a pan' in days rather than months.
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.