Protege

Protege is building the infrastructure layer for AI training data — solving what is arguably the biggest unmet need in AI today: getting access to the right data to train models.

The process of acquiring high-quality training data is time-intensive, incredibly expensive, and often ends in failure. Data holders don't know where to start and are rightly concerned about governance, intellectual property, and security implications. AI companies can spend years finding and negotiating access to the data they need.

Protege solves these problems by providing an easy-to-use platform that connects data holders with vetted data users — facilitating the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data.

What makes Protege unique is that they're not just a data broker. The company operates an internal Data Lab that transforms and enriches datasets specifically for AI training, making them significantly more valuable for frontier AI labs and model builders. They partner with organizations across healthcare, media, and other verticals to provide high-quality, real-world training data.

Key highlights:

• $65M in total funding — $55M Series A (August 2025) backed by Andreessen Horowitz, CRV, Bloomberg Beta, Footwork, Shaper Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Flex Capital, and a $10M Seed round with investors including Adam D'Angelo and SV Angel.
• Explosive growth — the company hit its entire 2026 goal by June, growing far faster than expected.
• ~80 employees and scaling rapidly with a lean, high-trust team of builders.
• Operating at massive scale — processing up to a trillion images in a single delivery for customers.

Solving AI's data problem is a generational opportunity. The company that succeeds will be one of the largest in AI — and in tech. Protege is positioned to be that company.