Protege Raises $30M to Solve AI Development's Biggest Bottleneck Through Licensed Real-World Data

"AI's progress has hit a critical constraint: access to real-world data. While public datasets and web scraping powered AI's early breakthroughs, today's models demand proprietary data from hospitals, enterprises, studios, and regulated environments - data that's been locked away behind legal, technical, and governance barriers. This bottleneck affects every stage of AI development, from pre-training to evaluation, forcing model builders to rely on synthetic data that can't fully replicate the complexity of human behavior and real-world scenarios."

"Working with data partners across healthcare, media, and motion capture, the company has aggregated access to billions of data points, including over 3B clinical notes, 100M medical images, 500K+ hours of video content, and 500K+ hours of audio across 50+ languages. With their recent acquisition of Calliope Networks and partnerships spanning from the majority of "Magnificent Seven" tech companies to hundreds of data providers, Protege is becoming the central infrastructure layer connecting proprietary data with AI development needs."

Access to real-world proprietary data from hospitals, enterprises, studios, and regulated environments has become a critical constraint on AI progress. Public datasets and web scraping no longer suffice as modern models demand protected, high-quality data that remains locked behind legal, technical, and governance barriers. Synthetic data cannot fully reproduce complex human behavior and real-world scenarios, creating gaps across pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluation. Protege creates a platform that enables data holders to license proprietary datasets while preserving privacy, IP protections, and compliance. Protege has aggregated billions of data points across clinical, imaging, video, and audio domains and recently raised $30M in a Series A1 led by a16z.

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