Per-request marketplace for AI access to publisher content
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.
TollBit was founded in 2023 by Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi and is based in New York.
Disclosed funding to date totals $31M. The most recent disclosed round was a Series A of $24M, announced 22 October 2024. Investors on record include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Section 32, Sunflower Capital, AIX Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Operator Collective.
Direct and adjacent competitors tracked in the Atlas.
Attribution and revenue sharing for AI answers
ProRata.ai, founded by Bill Gross, builds attribution technology that apportions AI-generated answers back to source publishers and splits resulting revenue, and operates the Gist answer engine and Gist Answers on-site search for publishers. It closed a $40M Series B led by Touring Capital in September 2025, bringing total funding above $75M.
Nonprofit collective licensing body behind the RSL standard
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.
Marketplace for licensed AI training data
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
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
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
AskNews supplies structured and synthetic news data to AI developers while routing royalties back to source publishers. Its pre-seed funding amount is undisclosed.