01/08/2026
Access to data has become AI's biggest bottleneck - and Protege just closed $30M led by a16z to solve it. While synthetic data and web scraping hit their limits, this platform connects AI builders with proprietary datasets from hospitals, studios, and enterprises across healthcare, media, audio, and motion capture. With billions of data points now accessible through licensed agreements and the majority of "Magnificent Seven" tech companies already using their platform, find out how Protege is creating the infrastructure layer that determines which AI models can succeed in real-world applications.
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 leg...
