Protege, the platform designed to enable the secure exchange of proprietary data for artificial intelligence training, today announced the close of a $25 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Footwork, with participation from existing investors including CRV, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital, Shaper Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, and more.

“Access to the right training data continues to be the biggest bottleneck to AI’s progress. Protege was born out of a belief that the next generation of AI breakthroughs will be powered by enabling data holders to safely allow controlled access to their data,” 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.”

Since its $10 million seed round in 2024, Protege has partnered with leading foundational models and AI companies, generating tens of millions in revenue for its data partners. Today, Protege has over 100 data partners across healthcare and media and boasts an expansive catalog of AI training data, including access to over 300,000 hours of video content, over 500,000 hours of audio content, billions of clinical notes, and hundreds of millions of medical images. Last week, Protege launched two new verticals, Audio & Speech and Motion Capture, to further expand its reach.

Founded by Bobby Samuels, Travis May (CEO of Shaper Capital and co-founder and former CEO of LiveRamp and Datavant), Chief Scientific Officer Engy Ziedan, and CTO Richard Ho, Protege partners with data owners across industries to make proprietary data accessible to AI developers in a safe and governed way. For AI builders, Protege’s expertise in navigating data fragmentation and sourcing hard-to-find data assets supports effective and efficient model development.

“The richest data in the world — and the most important information for training AI — sits in proprietary data sets: rich human knowledge is embedded in content like videos, news articles, audio clips, medical images, textbooks, and many other proprietary sources,” said May. “We believe that safely unlocking this data is one of the single biggest opportunities to accelerate the pace of AI development.”

After growing its business 20x in 2025, Protege will use the Series A funding to deepen its product investments, expand into new verticals, and grow its partnerships with enterprise customers and data partners.

“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. As more organizations look to build AI products grounded in real-world data, Protege’s platform will be critical to doing so safely and at scale.”