Artificial intelligence data platform startup Protege Health Inc. today announced that it has raised $30 million in new funding.

It’s aimed at accelerating product development, expanding its data network into new domains and data formats, deepening partnerships and scaling its team and infrastructure to deliver AI-ready and rights-protected access to real-world data.

Founded in 2024, Protege offers an AI data platform that tackles one of the most persistent challenges in AI development: accessing high-quality, proprietary training data quickly, safely and at scale. The company’s offering differs from other companies and models that rely on publicly available or synthetic datasets by instead connecting organizations that hold valuable data with AI developers who need it for training and evaluation. The idea is to allow both sides to participate in a governed data exchange ecosystem.

Protege aggregates, curates and delivers real-world datasets across multiple domains and formats to support the needs of modern AI research teams. Examples include complex and high-value data types such as video and audio collections, de-identified clinical health records and medical imaging.

The platform’s capabilities extend beyond simple data delivery alone by helping data holders determine the value of their datasets, ensuring compliance with privacy and intellectual property requirements and offering technical expertise to structure datasets so they are AI-ready.

Protege also operates a curated marketplace and compliance layer for AI developers and model builders that streamlines acquiring proprietary training data. Through the marketplace, users can discover, request, filter and combine datasets with support and transparency.

“Access to data is the biggest bottleneck to the advancement of AI,” said co-founder and Chairman Travis May. “The next phase of AI will be driven by real-world, proprietary data generated through everyday human activity. Protege is pioneering ways to safely access this information across data sources and compensate data owners to unlock AI’s potential.”

Through 2025, Protege expanded its data partner network to hundreds of organizations to provide aggregated access to new data sources and formats. Protege curates datasets from across its partner network to meet AI development needs and provides revenue share payouts to data partners with each use.

The $30 million in new funding came exclusively from Andreessen Horowitz and was an extension of a $25 million Series A round the company raised in August from Footwork VC LP, Charles River Ventures LP, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital LP and Shaper Capital LP.

“The next era of AI will be shaped by who can responsibly unlock access to the world’s most valuable data,” said Daisy Wolf, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Protege has built a platform that respects the complexity of real-world data across industries while making it usable for modern AI development.”

Image: Protege