Exclusive: AI startup TollBit raises $24M series A
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TollBit, a two-sided marketplace for publishers and AI companies, has raised a $24 million series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, executives told Axios.
Why it matters: TollBit hopes its marketplace can reduce the legal and business friction that's made data-sharing between the media industry and AI firms tense and complicated.
- "As AI agents become more accessible and proliferate at an exponential rate, publishers and digital content owners need a way to monetize content that doesn't rely simply on eyeballs and clicks," said Lightspeed partner Michael Mignano. TollBit, he said, is the solution.
Zoom in: The new round will help TollBit hire more people and expand internationally, co-founder Toshit Panigrahi told Axios.
- S32, a venture firm, also participated in the new round, alongside investments from Google AI lead Jeff Dean and Roblox product chief Manuel Bronstein.
- The Series A round follows a $7 million seed round in March, bringing the startup's total funding to $31 million. No valuation was publicly disclosed during either funding period.
State of play: The new funding round coincides with the official launch of TollBit's marketplace out of beta.
- The marketplace allows publishers to monitor AI bot traffic and monetize when it scrapes their verified content. AI companies can manage relationships with many publishers at once in real time based on marketplace demand.
- TollBit also said Tuesday that it has struck deals with its first set of publishing partners, including Penske Media Corporation, Time, Mumsnet, Trusted Media Brands, Candr Media Group and AdWeek.
- Fittingly, the first piece of content to be licensed out using TollBit as a platform was Time's 100 Most Powerful People in AI list, Panigrahi said.
The big picture: OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity and other AI firms are brokering licensing deals with publishers where they pay upfront for the right to use a publisher's content.
- But Panigrahi believes a marketplace solution is more sustainable and scalable because it allows AI companies to pay a fair market value for access to the content they need, rather than try to negotiate hundreds of subjective deals with many different publishers simultaneously.
- "It's not that they don't have an unwillingness to pay for the content," Panigrahi said. "The problem that we found is oftentimes they don't want to form partnerships because partnerships are a long, drawn out, human-intensive process."
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect the names of two investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners (not Lightspeed Ventures) and S32 (not Section 32).
