We're proud to have advised Footwork on its investment in Protege, an AI training data platform that has quickly become critical infrastructure for some of the world's leading AI companies.

Protege was founded in 2024 by Bobby Samuels and Travis May - co-founder and former CEO of LiveRamp and Datavant - to address what they identified as the single biggest bottleneck in AI development: access to high-quality, real-world training data. The company aggregates licensed datasets from trusted data holders across healthcare, media, audio, and motion capture, and curates them into AI-ready formats with privacy, IP, and compliance protections built in. Its catalog includes access to over 3 billion clinical notes, 100 million medical images, 300,000+ hours of video content, and 500,000+ hours of audio - and it works with the majority of the Magnificent Seven technology companies to support their training and evaluation workflows.

After growing its business 20x in 2025, Protege raised a $25 million Series A in August 2025 - with Footwork co-leading alongside CRV, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital, and Shaper Capital. In January 2026, Andreessen Horowitz led a $30 million Series A extension, with Footwork and other existing investors returning. Total funding has reached $65 million since the company's founding.

Footwork's conviction here reflects exactly the kind of patient, thesis-driven investing we enjoy supporting. Congratulations to the Protege team and to Footwork on a fantastic bet.