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LEADING MEDIA AND TECH INVESTORS BET ON "TOLLBIT" - THE FIRST PLATFORM TO TACKLE THE NEW ECONOMICS OF CONTENT IN THE AI ERATech Founders Raise nearly $7M in Funding to Create a New Infrastructure that Allows AI Bots and Data Scrapers to Efficiently Pay for Website Content TollBit will Benefit Publishing Industry, Tech Companies, and Consumers by Boosting Content Revenue, Protecting Quality Information, and Reducing Legal Uncertainty NEW YORK, March 5, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- TollBit founders Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi today announced the company has raised $7M for their new platform aimed at addressing the shifting economics of web content in the age of AI. TollBit allows AI bots and data scrapers to pay websites directly to license their content. The technology allows websites to monetize data and content, monitor bot traffic to sites, and easily onboard AI and LLM partners. By providing a tech infrastructure,TollBit helps to establish clear guardrails to reduce the legal uncertainty of scraping. The system relies on tokens that are issued and validated by the platform to ensure every scrape is authorized and logged. "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," said Joslin and Panigrahi. TollBit has raised initial funding from top investors with ties across digital media, tech, and AI. The round was led by Sunflower Capital and includes participation from AIX, Lerer Hippeau, Operator Collective, and Liquid 2 Ventures. Among other things, the funding will be used for the continued expansion of TollBit's tech team. Researchers have already raised concerns that AI companies may be running out of high quality content and data and many publishers see language models and web-enabled AI tools as an existential threat to website traffic. "Modern AI agents rely on a steady stream of fresh and high-quality content and dta 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," said 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," added 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," said Ben Lerer, Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau. "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." TollBit is currently onboarding publishers to the platform. Learn more at https://tollbit.com/ About TollBit About Sunflower About AIX About Lerer Hippeau About Liquid 2 About Operator Collective For more information contact: press@tollbit.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/leading-media-and-tech-investors-bet-on-tollbit---the-first-platform-to-tackle-the-new-economics-of-content-in-the-ai-era-302080097.html SOURCE TollBit |