
Protege is an AI training data platform that shortens procurement time for high-quality, multimodal training datasets while preserving governance and intellectual property controls. The platform…

Protege is an AI training data platform that shortens procurement time for high-quality, multimodal training datasets while preserving governance and intellectual property controls. The platform…
What they do: AI training-data platform that curates, licenses, and delivers real-world multimodal datasets for model development
Founded: 2024
Headquarters / HQ: New York (documented in profiles)
Recent funding: $30M Series A extension led by Andreessen Horowitz (Jan 2026); prior Series A $25M (Aug 2025); $10M seed (Sep 2024)
Founders / leadership: Bobby Samuels (CEO & co-founder); Travis May (Chairman & co-founder)
Bridging the gap between data holders and AI developers by enabling compliant, high-quality dataset sourcing and licensing for model training and evaluation.
2024
Data Infrastructure and Analytics
10000000
Seed round with participation from SV Angel, Liquid 2 Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital, Adam D'Angelo, Travis May, and others
25000000
30000000
Extension that expanded the August 2025 Series A, bringing cumulative funding to $65M since founding
“Includes participation from prominent investors such as CRV, Footwork, Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg Beta, Flex Capital, SV Angel, Liquid 2 Ventures, Adam D'Angelo, Travis May, and others”
| Company |
|---|
Company Overview:
We are building Protege to solve the biggest unmet need in AI — getting access to the right training data. The process today is time intensive, incredibly expensive, and often ends in failure. The Protege platform facilitates the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data.
Solving AI’s data problem is a generational opportunity. We’re backed by world-class investors and already powering partnerships with some of the most ambitious teams in AI. The company that succeeds will be one of the largest in AI — and in tech.
We’re a lean, fast-moving, high-trust team of builders who are obsessed with velocity and impact. Our culture is built for people who thrive on ambiguity, own outcomes, and want to shape the future of data and AI.
The Opportunity
We’re looking for a Founding Product Manager to own product development in Protege’s media business. With a handful of media customers today (including some of the biggest foundation models) and a full pipeline, we’re looking for someone to take the reins from our Head of Product and deliver on maturing the product suite serving our media vertical. Product opportunities span data ingestion and delivery systems — the backbone of how we scale our media data catalog for AI training — as well as the development of UIs and possibly data products. It will be up to you to find opportunities, work with stakeholders to prioritize them, design solutions with engineering, and oversee their build and rollout.
Up first, you’ll bridge engineering, product, and partnerships to ensure that millions of hours of content flow seamlessly through Protege’s ingestion, normalization, and metadata enrichment pipelines. You’ll work cross-functionally to build a product roadmap that will help the media business scale and translate those opportunities into clear requirements for our engineering team, managing the development, QA, and launch cycles for those solutions.
What You’ll Do
Define, prioritize, and execute the roadmap for Protege’s media business, starting with projects in data ingestion/processing and content visibility/searchability.
Work with external partners and internal teams to understand pain points and prioritize solutions.
Translate abstract problems (e.g., “partner ingestion bottlenecks”) into actionable, measurable engineering work.
Who You Are
Bonus if you have these experiences:
Why Product at Protege

Your next opportunity is in here somewhere. Sign up to explore 70,000+ startups and their open roles. No spam. No gamification. Just jobs.
70,000+
Startups
83,000+
Open Roles
4,400+
New This Week
Manage backlog, tradeoffs, and stakeholder communication with precision and transparency.
Understand how AI developers use media embeddings and metadata downstream, ensuring data quality aligns with use case needs.
As a founding team member: contribute to product culture, hiring, and process definition.