Nonprofit collective licensing body behind the RSL standard
2025
The RSL Collective is a nonprofit collective rights organization launched in September 2025 alongside Really Simple Licensing (RSL), an open standard that extends robots.txt with machine-readable licensing terms including pay-per-crawl and pay-per-inference. It is not venture funded.
Per-request marketplace for AI access to publisher content
2023·New York·$31M
TollBit lets publishers detect AI bot traffic and charge AI applications per request for access to their content, and reports on AI crawler and referral activity. It raised roughly $7M in seed funding in March 2024 and a $24M Series A led by Lightspeed in October 2024.
Marketplace for licensed AI training data
2024·London
Human Native runs a marketplace connecting rights holders with AI developers for licensed training data. It announced a seed round of GBP 2.8 million led by LocalGlobe and Mercuri in June 2024; fundingTotalUsd is left null because the round was reported in pounds sterling.
Data licensing platform for AI developers
2024·New York·$10M
Protege connects data owners, including publishers and content businesses, with AI developers seeking licensed training data. Aggregated sources report a $10M seed round.
AI bot analytics and content monetization for publishers
2024·San Francisco
ScalePost helps publishers and brands classify AI bot traffic at the URL and edge-log level, measure how their content is cited in AI answers, and broker licensing and revenue-share deals with AI companies. Aggregators report roughly $1.1M raised.
Synthetic news data and royalty distribution for publishers
2023·Arvada
AskNews supplies structured and synthetic news data to AI developers while routing royalties back to source publishers. Its pre-seed funding amount is undisclosed.