Please welcome TollBit, the platform helping websites protect and monetize their content against AI web scraping
Meet TollBit, the latest addition to Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio.
HQ: New York
Founders: Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi
The problem: Historically, web scraping was done by a select few people, often white-collar professionals, comprising a small percent of the world’s web users. The development, however, of GPT technology has placed powerful web-scraping tools in the hands of anyone with access. Today, very few people use an internet-connected GPT, such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, but as availability and usage become more widespread, the need for direct website or app visits will reduce significantly. This shift will place immense strain on unique websites and challenges the traditional web interaction and monetization models. GPT technologies effectively serve to disintermediate visitors from the companies and websites with data. Websites that once relied on traffic — driven in large part by search engines — will need to find new ways of driving growth. We need a mechanism that allows companies to internalize the value of their own first-party data and monetize “microtransactions” via scraping.
TollBit’s solution: TollBit enables companies to provide paid, legal access to first- and second-party web data and content. On the supply side, TollBit’s clients are companies with openly accessible websites, whose data are vulnerable to scraping. They include major publishers, creator-led channels, multinational manufacturers, social networks, and e-commerce sites. Using TollBit, these sites can set rates and rules for autonomous (non-human) access to any specific URL. This enables companies to realize the true value of their data, which would otherwise be prone to payment-free scraping. With TollBit, publishers can monitor and block AI traffic, manage licensing deals, and recoup meaningful revenue. At the same time, AI models need to reduce legal uncertainty around using the high-quality content and data they need to furnish users with trustworthy and timely answers to queries. They require a steady stream of fresh and valuable content to remain relevant and useful. TollBit’s solution benefits all parties in the ecosystem.
Origin story: Olivia and Toshit first met while working together at Toast, the restaurant management software company. Olivia’s background is in AI and automation, and Toshit’s experience is in consumer and ad tech. While working at other tech companies, they’d seen a troubling lack of infrastructure industry-wide around emerging GPT technologies, and came together to tackle this particular issue.
Why we’re betting on it: The scraping market in 2022 reached $8 billion and is set to explode in the coming years as web-GPT technology platforms switch to on-demand data access. Over the next five years, almost every company will offer products or features that use online GPT models, and consumers will have immediate access to AI tools that lack knowledge cutoffs. TollBit is the first platform to tackle the new economics of content in the AI era.
We couldn’t be more excited to partner with TollBit as they help digital publishers and other clients navigate content strategy in the age of the AI internet.
Our take: Over the past 15 years, our team has run and invested in dozens of media companies and media-adjacent businesses. Our co-founders, Ken Lerer, Eric Hippeau, and Ben Lerer developed their careers largely in media, at the helms of companies like Thrillist, GroupNine Media, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, AOL, NowThis, Vox, and Ziff Davis. This experience, along with our work investing in today’s and tomorrow’s leading tech companies, has given us a front-row seat in the very conversation TollBit has entered. GPT technology is poised to undercut publishers of original content, yet LLMs and AI applications need a legal way to access websites, of all kinds, and the unique content they contain. TollBit’s solution is a first mover here to solve for both sides of the market.
Further reading: “TollBit raises $7 million to solve the AI vs. publisher conflict” via Axios
