In January 2026, the AI data orchestration platform Protege secured $30 million in a Series A funding round. The investment was led by a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), with participation from existing investors who recognize the platform as the critical “expert layer” for LLM fine-tuning.
The company is led by Co-Founder and CEO Bobby Pinero, formerly the VP of Finance and Operations at Intercom. Protege operates a specialized marketplace that connects AI labs—such as OpenAI and Anthropic—with subject matter experts to generate high-fidelity, human-annotated data for RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback).
As general internet data reaches its limit, the frontier of AI now depends on specialized “vertical knowledge.” Protege addresses this by automating the sourcing and management of expert contributors across medicine, law, and engineering. This move toward intent-driven, expert-verified intelligence mirrors the architecture of agentic professional services, where human expertise is scaled through AI-native platforms.
The new capital will be used to expand its “Expert Network” and refine its automated quality-assurance models. By enforcing high-fidelity logic in the data ingestion process, Protege provides a level of structural integrity similar to AI-native logic enforcement layers, ensuring that the foundation of AI models is built on verified, bias-resistant facts.
Market Signal
- The “Data Is the New Oil” 2.0: Protege’s $30M round validates that high-quality, expert-led data is the primary bottleneck for AGI. Investors are shifting focus from general data scrapers to “Curated Context” platforms that provide the rare knowledge needed to make AI useful in professional settings.
- Intercom Pedigree: Bobby Pinero’s experience scaling Intercom’s operational backbone gives Protege the domain authority to handle complex, multi-party marketplace dynamics. This “Founder-Market Fit” is why a16z led the round, viewing Protege as the essential infrastructure for the next generation of verticalized models.
- The RLHF Efficiency Alpha: By automating the vetting and payout of thousands of global experts, Protege is turning the artisanal process of AI training into an industrial-scale utility. This “Intelligence Supply Chain” is a prerequisite for the autonomous agent economy, where models must reason with human-level precision.
Key Details
- Company: Protege
- Funding: $30M Series A
