TollBit founders Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi announced the company has raised $7 million for its new platform, TollBit, which aims to address the shifting economics of web content in the age of AI. TollBit enables AI bots and data scrapers to pay websites directly to license their content.
This technology lets websites monetize data and content, monitor bot traffic to sites, and easily onboard AI and LLM partners. By providing a tech infrastructure,TollBit helps establish clear guardrails to reduce the legal uncertainty of scraping. This system relies on tokens issued and validated by the platform to ensure every scrape is authorized and logged.
TollBit raised initial funding from top investors with ties to digital media, tech, and AI. The round was led by Sunflower Capital and included participation from AIX, Lerer Hippeau, Operator Collective, and Liquid 2 Ventures. The funding will, among other things, be used to expand TollBit’s tech team.
KEY QUOTES:
“We are seeing a fundamental shift in the economics of the Internet: as more consumers turn to AI to meet their needs, less eyeballs will reach websites. This trend inadvertently undercuts the financial health of the publishers and websites that reliable AI needs to thrive. AI agents and LLMs are only as good as the information they can access so this poses a massive threat to the entire ecosystem. TollBit is building the infrastructure to help power the Internet in this new era by ensuring publishers and content creators can be fairly paid for their work.”
- Joslin and Panigrahi
“Modern AI agents rely on a steady stream of fresh and high-quality content and data to provide users with trustworthy and timely answers. We believe TollBit will be a key part of the future AI stack, providing a mechanism to incentivize and compensate publishers for the content and data they produce.”
- Anthony Goldbloom, Partner at AIX
“This disruption is coming for every industry. Any company that relies on traffic to a website or app will need to rethink their approach. User-generated and aggregated content sites will soon be impacted as AI products begin to be able to take actions on end-users’ behalf.”
- Liu Jiang, Founder of Sunflower Capital
“Our fund and leadership have spent decades managing and investing in legacy and digital media businesses, so we’ve seen the enormous impact technology has had on the sector. The incredible power of AI promises tremendous benefits to society, but we need to act swiftly to coalesce around a sustainable content model that satisfies both the supply and demand sides of the market. If we fail to establish systems-wide guardrails and incentivize rich content creation, the entire system will collapse – it’s the start of a sinkhole and we’re all at risk of falling in. TollBit’s solution benefits all parties, protecting world-class journalism, creative content, accurate data, and LLMs’ ability to mature and improve.”
- Ben Lerer, Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau
