Today, we are thrilled to announce that
@withprotegeai has raised a new $30M funding round led by
@a16z.
When
@BobbySamuels and former
@DatavantHQ co-founder and CEO Travis May first started Protege in 2024, we saw three bottlenecks to AI’s progress — compute, models, and data. Compute has scaled dramatically, models continue to improve, but access to the right data remains the hardest part.
That’s why Protege exists: to be the infrastructure for real-world data in AI development. In the few months since our last round of funding, we’ve felt the urgent demand pull across industries, domains, and modalities. We are rapidly expanding to meet those needs.
When AI builders come to Protege, they’re looking for real-world data: the most authentic signal of how people and systems actually behave. This is not synthetic data created by AI nor manufactured data created to simulate human behavior.
Across every stage of the AI development lifecycle — from pre-training to post-training to fine-tuning to evaluation — AI builders need this data. They’re looking across modalities and industries: healthcare, video, audio, motion capture, gaming, manufacturing, life sciences, real estate, finance, education, and many more. Foundational, multi-modal model-builders (including the majority of the Magnificent Seven) now work with us across multiple domains along with dozens of other model builders.
Thanks to
@daisydwolf and the rest of the a16z team for joining us on this journey as well as our existing investors also participating in this round —
@nbt at
@footworkvc,
@saarsaar at
@CRV,
@BloombergBeta,
@flexcapital, Shaper Capital, and others.
Lastly, a huge thank you to the
@withprotegeai team for making this all possible.
More details in 🧵!
#AIDevelopment #DataInfrastructure #a16z #StartupFunding #Protege
