The Gap
High-quality data is the bottleneck for AI progress. Not compute, not architecture, but data.
Bobby Samuels, CEO of Protégé — a16z.news, March 2026
Three bottlenecks gate AI progress. Compute and models have attracted hundreds of billions in capital — data has no comparable institution, no dominant player, and remains dramatically underinvested. That's the whitespace Fund I is built to fill.
We back the founders building that data: proprietary, defensible, and structurally hard to replicate — not commodity data that's merely scraped, but data acquired through unique methodology, purpose-built for specific verticals, with a global reach.
Proprietary IP
Data acquired through unique methodology, not merely scraped.
Vertical Depth
Critical data assets purpose-built for specific industries and use cases.
Global Reach
Solutions spanning multiple geographies and markets.
Strategic Focus Areas
Fund I concentrates on data categories where proprietary methodology and vertical depth create a defensible moat.
Corporate Intelligence Data
Technographic, firmographic, and AI-spend intelligence for GTM, sales, and market mapping.
Workforce & Labor Intelligence
Talent, hiring, and workforce datasets fueling HR tech and people analytics.
Transaction & Consumer Signals
Purchase behavior and demand data for retail, fintech, and consumer platforms.
Supply Chain & Logistics Data
Shipment, inventory, risk-management, and operational signals for industrial and trade workflows.
ESG & Compliance Data
Verified, auditable datasets supporting regulatory, sustainability, and carbon-offset reporting.
Vertical AI Training Data
Domain-specific, rights-cleared datasets purpose-built to train specialized models.
Ready to scale the data layer?
Fund I is actively deploying capital into founders building the proprietary data infrastructure of the AI economy.