Startup profile · funding coverage
Protege funding, valuation and investors
Governed marketplace licensing real-world multimodal data for AI training.
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Funding, valuation & investors
Answer-first snapshotLatest funding
Series A extension
$30M · January 2026
Latest known valuation
Not publicly disclosed
Total disclosed equity funding
$65M
Excludes debt, grants, acquisitions, secondaries, and IPO proceeds.
Current status
private
series a · New York, NY
Overview
Protege operates a governed marketplace where data holders license proprietary multimodal datasets — de-identified health records, medical imaging, audio, video — to AI developers under contractual provenance and revenue-sharing terms. Founded in 2024 in New York by Bobby Samuels (CEO), Travis May (chairman; former LiveRamp and Datavant CEO), Engy Ziedan (CSO), and Richard Ho (CTO). CRV led a $10M seed; Footwork led a $25M Series A in August 2025; Andreessen Horowitz led a $30M Series A extension in January 2026 bringing total funding to $65M with CRV and Footwork re-upping. The company reports 20× business growth in 2025 and hundreds of data-partner organizations.
Why Protege is interesting
Datavant/LiveRamp veterans Bobby Samuels and Travis May sell consent-based healthcare and media datasets to AI labs — 20× growth in 2025 before a16z led a $30M extension to $65M total.
Product & use cases
Protege connects data owners and AI builders through consent-based licensing, governance workflows, curated dataset delivery, and revenue share — making fragmented real-world data AI-ready without gray-market scraping.
- Licensed de-identified healthcare data for model training and evaluation
- Multimodal media and audio datasets for foundation-model development
- Governed enterprise data exchange with provenance and contractual controls
- Revenue generation for data holders monetizing proprietary assets
Key facts
- Seed (2024): $10M led by CRV (SuperbCrew / press summaries)
- Series A (Aug 2025): $25M led by Footwork; CRV and others participated (PR Newswire)
- Series A extension (Jan 2026): $30M led by a16z; total funding $65M (Business Wire)
- 20× business growth in 2025 per August 2025 Series A announcement
- Founders built data-exchange infrastructure at LiveRamp and Datavant scale
Funding history (newest first)
Series A extension
2026-01 $30MSource: Read source · businesswire.com
Investors in our directory
Funds linked from Protege's profile — open a fund page for stage focus and related deal articles.
Competitive landscape
Edge: Founding team built enterprise data connectivity at LiveRamp/Datavant — Protege applies that playbook to AI-era licensing with compliance and revenue share built in.
Protege targets enterprise-grade governed data as regulatory pressure on training corpora intensifies. Scale AI and labs' direct deals compete for the same assets; Protege differentiates on compliance infrastructure and data-holder revenue share. Speed of curating fragmented health and media sources is the operational moat.
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Scale AI direct
Data labeling and licensing at scale; started with human annotation, expanding into curated datasets.
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Snowflake Marketplace adjacent
Data sharing inside warehouse environments; less AI-native curation and licensing workflow.
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Direct publisher/lab data deals incumbent
Bespoke bilateral contracts; slow to scale versus marketplace aggregation.
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Web scraping / open crawls alternative
Lower cost but rising legal and regulatory risk versus licensed provenance.
Notable stories
- Travis May — who previously co-founded LiveRamp and led Datavant — joined Protege as chairman, arguing 'access to data is the biggest bottleneck to the advancement of AI' (Business Wire, January 2026).
- Protege reported 20× business growth in 2025 before the Footwork-led Series A — unusually fast traction for a marketplace that must onboard both data holders and AI buyers (PR Newswire, August 2025).
Industries
Market / IPO context
Editorial / static context — not a live quote.
Related funding articles
Venture Capital Tracker pieces that cover Protege's financing or category context.
FAQs about Protege
Practical answers founders, operators, and investors typically search for.
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