Protege Acquires Calliope Networks, Unlocking Premium Video Data for AI Training
Expands network to more than 70 data sources and adds hundreds of thousands of hours of premium audiovisual content to Protege platform
Protege, the platform for AI training data, announced its acquisition of Calliope Networks, a leader in aggregating media content for licensing by generative AI companies. Protege equips data and content holders with the tools to make their assets available for AI training use cases safely and efficiently, while enabling model builders to discover and access responsibly-sourced data with confidence. Protege now works with over 70 leading data and content owners to make their assets securely available for AI training purposes and works with leading foundational models and AI applications to get access to rich data and content.
To date, Protege has focused on the healthcare vertical, building access to the largest multi-modal health data sets to help leading AI applications and foundational models safely train their algorithms, representing over 100 million images and over 3 billion unstructured notes. This acquisition will allow Protege to expand beyond healthcare into its second vertical: media.
Calliope Networks brings to Protege access to hundreds of thousands of hours of global, high-quality TV, film, news and sports content, including an extensive selection of 4K and 3D formats, and a team with decades of experience in content licensing from companies like NBCUniversal, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Fox. This acquisition enables Protege to offer unparalleled resources for AI developers seeking diverse and premium training datasets.
“This acquisition is a key milestone for Protege,” said Bobby Samuels, CEO of Protege. “Access to training data is the single biggest bottleneck facing the AI community today. To date, the most sophisticated models have been primarily trained on public, scrapable data, while most human knowledge, data, and content is proprietary and non-scrapable. Protege was launched to bridge this gap, and the Calliope team’s deep expertise in licensing premium content makes them the perfect group to integrate rich media data into our platform.”
Founded by Samuels and Travis May—CEO of Shaper Capital and co-founder and former CEO of LiveRamp and Datavant—Protege focuses on data types that are especially impactful for AI. Much of this data has never been made available for external use, being proprietary to data owners rather than in the public domain. Protege’s vision extends beyond any single industry, addressing the training data bottleneck that challenges the entire spectrum of AI applications.
“Travis and Bobby are visionary leaders, and we believe we can have a much greater impact together than separately,” said Dave Davis, CEO and co-founder of Calliope Networks. “Our combined expertise and resources will unlock unprecedented opportunities for content suppliers and the AI community.”
As part of the acquisition, Davis will transition to Protege along with Jim Golden, CTO and co-founder of Calliope, and three other executives, with Davis becoming General Manager of Protege’s media vertical, which will be called Protege Media.
Future plans include growing the media vertical team as well as Protege’s expansion into other verticals.
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