Bobby Samuels
177 posts
Bobby Samuels retweetledi
Today, we are thrilled to announce that @withprotegeai has raised a new $30M funding round led by @a16z.
When @BobbySamuels and former @DatavantHQ co-founder and CEO Travis May first started Protege in 2024, we saw three bottlenecks to AI’s progress — compute, models, and data. Compute has scaled dramatically, models continue to improve, but access to the right data remains the hardest part.
That’s why Protege exists: to be the infrastructure for real-world data in AI development. In the few months since our last round of funding, we’ve felt the urgent demand pull across industries, domains, and modalities. We are rapidly expanding to meet those needs.
When AI builders come to Protege, they’re looking for real-world data: the most authentic signal of how people and systems actually behave. This is not synthetic data created by AI nor manufactured data created to simulate human behavior.
Across every stage of the AI development lifecycle — from pre-training to post-training to fine-tuning to evaluation — AI builders need this data. They’re looking across modalities and industries: healthcare, video, audio, motion capture, gaming, manufacturing, life sciences, real estate, finance, education, and many more. Foundational, multi-modal model-builders (including the majority of the Magnificent Seven) now work with us across multiple domains along with dozens of other model builders.
Thanks to @daisydwolf and the rest of the a16z team for joining us on this journey as well as our existing investors also participating in this round — @nbt at @footworkvc, @saarsaar at @CRV, @BloombergBeta, @flexcapital, Shaper Capital, and others.
Lastly, a huge thank you to the @withprotegeai team for making this all possible.
More details in 🧵!
#AIDevelopment #DataInfrastructure #a16z #StartupFunding #Protege
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Bobby Samuels retweetledi
Today’s most capable models are increasingly constrained by access to data. Public datasets are largely exhausted. The internet has been scraped. AI models now need high-quality, real-world data to continue advancing.
That’s why we’re excited to announce a $30M Series A investment in Protege, the platform building the real-world data infrastructure for AI.
@withprotegeai connects the world’s leading AI builders with massive, multimodal datasets across healthcare, video, audio, motion capture, and more, unlocking data that has historically been fragmented, inaccessible, or prohibitively slow to use at scale.
Protege has already found an impressive product-market fit, and is a core data partner to the majority of MAG7 public companies, as well as many of the largest private players in AI.
We couldn’t think of a better team to build this company than Bobby Samuels (cofounder & CEO) and Travis May (cofounder and Chairman), who spent a decade building Datavant and LiveRamp into two of the biggest exits in the data space, alongside fellow cofounders Engy Ziedan (Chief Scientific Officer) and Richard Ho (CTO), who bring deep data and technical expertise.
By @daisydwolf and Eva Steinman
@BobbySamuels @engyziedan
Protege@withprotegeai
Today, we are thrilled to announce that @withprotegeai has raised a new $30M funding round led by @a16z. When @BobbySamuels and former @DatavantHQ co-founder and CEO Travis May first started Protege in 2024, we saw three bottlenecks to AI’s progress — compute, models, and data. Compute has scaled dramatically, models continue to improve, but access to the right data remains the hardest part. That’s why Protege exists: to be the infrastructure for real-world data in AI development. In the few months since our last round of funding, we’ve felt the urgent demand pull across industries, domains, and modalities. We are rapidly expanding to meet those needs. When AI builders come to Protege, they’re looking for real-world data: the most authentic signal of how people and systems actually behave. This is not synthetic data created by AI nor manufactured data created to simulate human behavior. Across every stage of the AI development lifecycle — from pre-training to post-training to fine-tuning to evaluation — AI builders need this data. They’re looking across modalities and industries: healthcare, video, audio, motion capture, gaming, manufacturing, life sciences, real estate, finance, education, and many more. Foundational, multi-modal model-builders (including the majority of the Magnificent Seven) now work with us across multiple domains along with dozens of other model builders. Thanks to @daisydwolf and the rest of the a16z team for joining us on this journey as well as our existing investors also participating in this round — @nbt at @footworkvc, @saarsaar at @CRV, @BloombergBeta, @flexcapital, Shaper Capital, and others. Lastly, a huge thank you to the @withprotegeai team for making this all possible. More details in 🧵! #AIDevelopment #DataInfrastructure #a16z #StartupFunding #Protege
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Every year, I put together a contest on who can best predict what will happen in the following year. The 2024 game is now live! You can play at form.typeform.com/to/LziUyORL
It’s 21 questions spanning the stock market, politics, media/entertainment, and more. Should take <5 min!
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@MattZeitlin I think a different kind of "grinder mindset" movie — but one that is maybe even more boiled to its essence — is "Whiplash"
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@MattZeitlin Matt, nothing makes me happier than Micky D's / The Founder getting some love on your Twitter feed this morning. Love live the golden arches
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has the ray kroc/mcdonalds movie "the founder" become really popular among grindset win success guys? the entire thing must be very appealing to that mindset, kroc's unique contribution was a business idea (franchising) tha only paid off through lots of grinding
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Bobby Samuels retweetledi
Source confirms: Albert Pujols is signing with the Cardinals. It’s a one-year, major league deal, pending physical, and a really cool potential bookend to his career. @dgoold and @katiejwoo were on it.
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We expanded financial aid a lot last year! (By that I mean more than $50k is now available to support staffers who have to fulfill a student income contribution)
Please reach out to me about the stipend program!!! (& also join our staff)
alex perry@WhoIsAlexPerry
@yaledailynews is ahead of its time with in-house financial aid for staffers!
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@EricNewcomer @EricNewcomer Shots fired. See you for dinner in Manhattan in 30 minutes.
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when I lived in San Francisco I treated being going to Oakland or Berkeley like an event. In New York people expect you to just go anywhere in the city
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Bobby Samuels retweetledi
👀 Not done yet!
Yadi is coming back for his 19th season in 2022.
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@Jacer_Acer Punctuation Top 3 (in order):
1. The Period
2. The Em Dash
3. The Comma
Honorable Mentions (in order):
4. Question Mark
5. Exclamation Point
6. Semicolon
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@forestkey and co. just launched @voodleme for iOS (geekwire.com/2020/tiktok-wo…). Great team--excited to check it out!
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In the category of "permanent changes post-Coronavirus," I suspect our generation will forever be better at cooking than they otherwise would've been.
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(7/8) Between all that, the actual outcomes of the votes in the primaries matter substantially less than they have previously; it’s much more important to stick around and show viability to best position yourself for the convention.
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(6/8) After that first round of DNC voting, all delegates are released from voting obligations and you bring in the Superdelegates. At that point, it’s anyone’s ballgame.
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3) Superdelegates won’t vote in the first round of DNC voting.
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2) There are four very legit, well-funded candidates who all are on pace to get over 15 percent in Iowa and have a significant amount of funding. And then there’s Bloomberg, whose polling is going up and is going to drop more than any US candidate ever.
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1) In the dem primaries, any candidate above 15 percent will receive a proportional share of the delegate count.
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