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

OpenAI operator is cool but we’ve seen similar things over a year ago from companies like Induced and others. AI using computer interfaces is going to be a definite benefit in some areas of productivity work but remains highly inefficient and insecure, especially for consumer use cases. Here’s a replay of the past year and a preview of what might come in a year if we don’t change it: 1. We saw applications of such technology to products like the Rabbit R1 and automating web browsers to complete user actions is unreliable and time consuming because 2. Cybersecurity tools flag obvious bot behavior and this creates an incentive structure for AI agents to behave more humanlike. We’ve seen other Operator competitors solve captchas and evade anti bot scripts. Cybersecurity is a cat and mouse game, increasing the cost to autonomously browse. This means 3. As the technology improves and it becomes increasingly expensive or difficult to determine if the traffic to a site is a human or a bot pretending to be human, it will erode advertiser trust, disrupt funnels and websites won’t be able to monetize traffic successfully. Bots mimicking humans should be a huge antipattern. We believe that it is possible to create a framework that incentivizes agents to self identify, and create routes for sanctioned access to our content and data. The risk was first posed to publishers with AI search apps, now it’s easy to see why this is a problem for any website or tech company. Josh Mayer and Olivia Joslin wrote about this on our blog a year ago: https://lnkd.in/eyVwp_vZ If you’re a provider of content or data on the websites that would rather incentivize opening sanctioned pathways for bots and agents, hit us up! There’s some cool stuff coming 🔜

Super excited to announce our partnership with HUMAN Security to bring advanced bot detection capabilities to websites and give bots the opportunity to pay for the content they are scraping through the TollBit Bot Paywall. The flavor of web scraping has changed with the onset of LLMs and autonomous browsing of the internet is only going to increase. With the two platforms, publishers can better understand AI traffic to their sites and identify new monetization opportunities. https://lnkd.in/efJtSFyQ

As Sam Altman said at The New York Times DealBook summit, the world is approaching the need for micropayments as means for compensation to content creators and data providers. As AI agents rise, we need infrastructure to have an exchange of value outside trading human eyeballs for ad revenue. That’s the infrastructure we’ve spent over a year building at TollBit - a protocol where any IP holder or web publisher can be paid through micropayments by AI apps as they consume content. This is the vision that over 450 data and content partners have signed up on TollBit for. OpenAI :) https://lnkd.in/e8xMEbRe

We're excited to announce that our co-founders Toshit Panigrahi and Olivia Joslin made the Forbes 30 Under 30 2025 List! A huge thank you to everyone who has helped us on our mission of building scalable solutions to content and data access challenges.

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