Tollbit - Spotify For AI Data Licensing

Company & Team Introduction

Tollbit is an innovative platform designed to help digital publishers monetize their content in the age of AI. The company allows publishers to set real-time tolls, charging AI companies whenever their content is accessed for training or usage in AI tools. Co-founded in 2023 by Olivia Joslin (COO) and Toshit Panigrahi (CEO), who previously worked together at Toast, the platform bridges the gap between content owners and AI developers, ensuring both sides see the upside of AI's rapidly growing content needs. Previous to Tollbit, Olivia held several product management roles at Fairmarkit, Attentive, and Toast before her final position as an AI Product Director at Fairmarkit. Toshit has an extremely well-rounded background through ~10 years working at Toast in various UI/UX, Product, and Engineering roles before becoming the New Ventures Lead. Publishers can onboard partners seamlessly, while AI companies gain access to legal and verifiable content. This groundbreaking solution is critical in an era where AI's growing demand for data poses challenges for traditional advertising-based revenue models. Their platform's scalability and ease of use position it as a promising player in the evolving AI ecosystem.​ Tollbit is based in NYC, New York and has grown to ~12 team members.

Product Overview

Tollbit’s novel platform aims to address the changing economic landscape of the internet, particularly as AI tools become central to digital content consumption. Their platform facilitates a marketplace that automatically charges AI companies whenever their tools access and use publishers' content. This model helps content creators and digital publishers monetize their data in a world where traditional advertising revenue is being disrupted by AI-driven scraping bots. Using Tollbit enables publishers to set dynamic pricing for content, including premium content, creating a new revenue stream. The platform integrates seamlessly with existing Content Delivery Networks (CDN), ensuring that onboarding is quick and cost-effective. AI developers benefit by gaining legal and verifiable access to content for training and real-time use cases, minimizing risks associated with copyright and IP infringement. By using this approach, Tollbit not only provides an immediate solution to the AI content monetization challenge but also sets the stage for a new model of internet economics where content creators are fairly compensated for the use of their material by AI tools.

Total Addressable Market

With AI’s meteoric rise since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the total addressable market for AI development has exploded into a vast opportunity valued at anywhere from 17.5B to 35B, according to a source from Variety.com and is growing exponentially. Of that potential 35B opportunity, assuming a fraction of that spend (5-10%) is allocated to content licensing spend, signalling a potential $1.75B-$3.5B opportunity currently.

Business Model & The Numbers

Tollbit facilitates real-time content licensing, ensuring publishers are paid immediately for each use without lengthy negotiations. Its business model is built around per-use payments for content, offering publishers the flexibility to set their own rates. Pricing is based on content usage, with a focus on fairness and transparency. Tollbit has yet to provide any visibility into the fees it receives from the transaction.

Traction

Tollbit has garnered impressive traction in the market, with a robust presence on both sides of its Marketplace. Initially building out the publisher side, the platform has rapidly onboarded over 200 publishers, including prominent organizations like TIME, ADWEEK, Penske Media Corporation, CANDR Media Group and Mumsnet. The company is also making significant strides in attracting AI companies, with notable players such as AI news app Particle and you.com amongst those already on board. Both sides of the market are excited about Tollbit's potential, with Particle's CEO Sara Beykpour stating, "Particle is really excited about the model TollBit is championing. Our visions are aligned, and we look forward to seeing TollBit enable innovation in media while ensuring that content publishers are compensated." Similarly, Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance (representing over 2,200 publishers), said, "As publishers work with AI developers to build equitable partnerships, TollBit offers a scalable ecosystem solution to help news publishers monitor, provide access and service licenses. We welcome efforts by companies like TollBit to help meet the needs of our industry, which is necessary for journalism to thrive."

Competitors

With such an enormous potential opportunity, a few other notable startups are attempting to tackle the same problem as Tollbit, each with its own distinct strategies to address the monetization gap between content owners and LLMs.

Human Native is a marketplace similar to Tollbit. It offers a comprehensive catalogue of content and gives rights holders fine-tuned control over what data can be used for AI training. The platform aims to help content creators and publishers prepare their data for AI models, including evaluating and benchmarking its quality. It offers both a subscription-based and revenue-share licensing model, positioning it as a strong option for AI companies to source clean, high-quality data.

ProRata.ai focuses on compensating rights holders based on the content displayed in LLM outputs rather than inputs, aiming for precise attribution and fair revenue-sharing through tailored licensing agreements. Their compensation model offers a 50/50 with publishers. Prorata also just released an AI search engine called gist.ai, which is wholly based on high-quality, licensed content.

Tollbit offers its data marketplace, connecting AI companies with publishers, but its core differentiator is its bot paywall, which allows website owners to track AI bot traffic, set rates for access, and directly monetize bot interactions on a real-time per-use basis. Tollbit also provides advanced analytics to help publishers understand and optimize bot traffic on their sites. While Tollbit includes content licensing like the competition, its focus is on protecting and generating revenue from AI bot traffic rather than preparing content for AI models. Their token-based system allows Tollbit to log and authorize any scraping of their content.

Funding

Since Tollbit’s founding, the company has raised two rounds of funding. The first capital injection came from its $7M seed round in March 2024, led by Sunflower Venture Partners and other participants such as firms like Lerer Hippeau, AIX Ventures, Operator Collective, and Liquid 2 Ventures and angel investors Victor Kushch and Tarek Alaruri, 2 of the founders of Fairmarkit. This capital helped the company acquire a strong network of hundreds of top publishers for its platform. After gaining strong publisher traction, the company raised a $24M Series A round in October 2024, spearheaded by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional names from Section 32 and notable angel investors Jeff Dean (AI lead, Google) and Manuel Bronstein (CPO, Roblox) taking part in the funding.