TollBit

We are proud to announce our $24M in Series A funding to revolutionize how AI companies and publishers work together. Our mission at TollBit is to continue to connect AI companies directly with content providers at scale. We do this by making it easy to manage the entire lifecycle of AI data licensing and support innovative business models to protect the health of the entire content ecosystem. Backed by Lightspeed and S32 as well as Jeff Dean, Manuel Bronstein, and prior investors, TollBit is setting a new standard for the future of AI and media. Since the last fundraise, TollBit has onboarded over 200 publisher websites with partners such as Penske Media Corporation, TIME, Mumsnet, TMB (Trusted Media Brands), CANDR Media Group, and ADWEEK. We've pioneered industry-first RAG licenses for publishers and also partnered with AI companies, such as Particle, to show that it is absolutely possible to pay content owners fairly as content is used in AI applications. We're proud to be leaders in building a new economic model for the Internet in the age of AI! Read more -?https://lnkd.in/g7-P87cY

TollBit is hiring! An amazing team. Great Partnerships opportunity. https://lnkd.in/e8iftPwn

???? Today’s presidential election is the first in the AI era - fast, accurate news is at a premium. That's why, together with TollBit, we created Election Agent, the only agent powered by live, trusted data directly from Decision Desk HQ, the same source used by major news organizations. As polls close, Election Agent will provide real-time vote counts and results analysis. We believe that facts matter, and there is no room for compromise. Try Election Agent now: https://lnkd.in/gu22fr2W

Excited to announce @youdotcom's Election Agent in partnership with @TollbitOfficial— the first AI agent that gives you real-time, accurate #ElectionDay results to your queries ??? Starting tonight at 7PM ET as polls begin to close, chat with our AI to get instant updates on presidential and down-ballot races, powered by @DecisionDeskHQ data. Try it tonight: you.com/2024election

On this important day in US history, we’re excited to bring accurate, real-time election data to an AI agent’s responses for the first time! Through our partnership with Decision Desk HQ & You.com, Americans can ask questions and get answers on the US presidential race & more by asking questions to the election agent on You.com. ?????This is an example of the infrastructure we’re building to let content and data owners supply critical information to AI applications at scale. ?? Tonight, try out You.com’s Election agent here: you.com/2024election Decision Desk HQ is providing real-time vote counts & results analysis to power this as polls close across the country. ? Some questions you can try now before polls start closing: “What is the Senate looking like?” “What are New Hampshire vote counts?” “How does Nebraska do voting?”

Amazing to be on the main stage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women conference to talk about how TollBit is building a marketplace for AI content licensing. Special thanks to the inimitable "Godmother of AI" Fei-Fei Li and my venture guru Mallun Yen! #FortuneMPW #OperatorCollective #Tollbit

Before the term Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) became common, extracting data from websites without permission was simply called data scraping. As generative AI has grown, concerns have emerged around its impact on content creators—particularly the loss of monetization and incentives to keep producing content. Publishers, who have historically raised alarms about major tech disruptions, are now facing a significant threat to their business and revenue from AI. This challenge led to the creation of TollBit, which recently announced a $24M Series A, led by our team. TollBit helps publishers and content creators automatically set up licensing deals with AI companies, ensuring they are paid for the content AI relies on. In the latest Generative Now Podcast, Michael Mignano speaks with Toshit Panigrahi CEO of TollBit, about how AI is changing content monetization and what TollBit is doing to protect creators. Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3NERhBF Apple: https://apple.co/40k3LX2 YouTube: https://bit.ly/48sAYl6

Earlier this week, I announced that Lightspeed was leading a $24M Series A in TollBit, the company that's making it possible for publishers to monetize their content in a world dominated by AI agents. Now, you can hear my conversation with the company's CEO, Toshit Panigrahi, on this week's episode of Generative Now. We covered a lot of ground, such as how advancements in AI are already reshaping the economics of the internet, TollBit’s innovative “bot paywall” for publishers, and how to keep incentivizing content creation. Full episode links in the comments below. Enjoy!

When #YouTube began to gain prominence, we at Zefr saw an opportunity for content #creators at a time when many of them saw a lawsuit. While they had fair claims about how YouTube was aggregating and surfacing their video content, it was clear to us that this was a train that had left the station and would not be stopped. You could get on and ride the future of content consumption or you could sit in court for years and let it pass you by. We went around to many studios, music labels, #publishers, and sports organizations, and pitched them on the promise of YouTube vs the peril by showing hard data around how their videos and views could turn into revenue and free marketing directly to their consumers. The rest is history as the idea of finding any kind of content on YouTube today is commonplace as it's the #2 search engine in the world, and it is widely considered the best content monetization platform out there. Cut to today. Instead of YouTube, we have #ChatGPT, #Perplexity, #Claude and many, many others all vying to lead the #GenAI revolution. Like then, it's unclear how exactly these companies are aggregating all of the content that drives their models, and the results they bring their customers (often for a fee). While there are some legal issues within them all, the opportunity for all content creators is once again to go on offense vs defense as like before, this train has left the station and will not be stopped. And this train is moving way, way faster this time around. That brings me to a company I have been following for the past 6 months, TollBit. In many ways, they are looking to do for content creators and IP owners of all kinds in the era of #LLMs, what we were doing for them in the era of YouTube and social video. They are looking to unlock and expand value for all: Creators, IP owners, consumers, and platforms. That was always my favorite part about working at Zefr: We created a solution where everybody was a winner. I believe Tollbit has the opportunity to do the same and so I was excited to hear this week that they announced a $23M fundraise. Check out CEO and Co-founder Toshit Panigrahi talk more about their company and the future he and his team see in the video below with Michael Mignano of Lightspeed. I'm rooting for them and if you're a creator of any kind, in this paradigm shift we're all going through, you should be too. As Toshit says, “This is not just a publisher problem, this is an internet wide problem.” Congrats to him, Olivia Joslin Martin Zhu Josh Stone and the entire team.

Congrats Toshit Panigrahi and team! We are excited to be working with you.