TollBit is about monetising AI bot traffic, says cofounder and CEO

Today we have crossed over 7,000 publishers (Time, AP and Adweek, among others) in the US, Europe, South Asia and Japan, says Toshit Panigrahi

TollBit helps publishers monetise traffic from artificial intelligence (AI) bots. The New York-based firm has raised $31 million from investors so far. On a recent trip to India, Toshit Panigrahi, cofounder and chief executive officer (CEO), spoke to Vanita Kohli-Khandekar on a video chat from Bengaluru. Edited excerpts:

 

How is TollBit placed currently on number of clients, and what kind of payouts are publishers getting?

 

We (Panigrahi and Olivia Joslin) started the company in October 2023. TollBit is a fresh take on what you thought was a copyright and an intellectual property (IP) problem.

 

It is actually a different problem — it is about the emergence of a new kind of visitor on the internet. You have n number of different ways to monetise humans — subscriptions, advertisements and affiliate links. You have no way to transact with a bot. That's what we created.

 

Today we have crossed over 7,000 publishers (Time, AP and Adweek, among others) in the US, Europe, South Asia and Japan.

 

India is a new market for us and we are at 20 publishers here currently. (TollBit came to India in September 2025). Publishers get paid anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to tens of thousands. It depends on the kind of property they are and how much leverage they have.

 

How does the bot pay?

 

Our pitch to publishers is the process of anyone trying to pay you today happens at the speed of humans. It needs to happen at the speed of AI. You cannot negotiate for months over a contract having lawyers going out to dinners. It needs to be fully programmatic. Every single site on TollBit gets a TollBit subdomain. We integrate with every single CDN (content delivery network) and cybersecurity tool so when the bots get detected, they are forwarded to that TollBit subdomain. If www is where the humans go to read content, the TollBit subdomain is where the bots get redirected to. The (AI) developer tells us what they are building, what their website is and register their user agents so that we can authenticate those. They have to put in their their payment details. We have their credit card information and do the billing as they consume content.

 

You mentioned somewhere that for you, publishers are not just the ones in the classical sense. It could be an Airbnb or an eBay. Could you please explain?

 

I was at Toast POS — a restaurant point of sale (PoS) company. When I was heading up their advertising business, it had an online ordering platform, waitlist reservation platform and we were running ads across all of them. At the same time, the publishers were talking about copy infringement, IP theft by AI companies.

 

I started wondering if one day AI agent apps order food for us or book tables, who am I going to show my ads to? That's when we realised that the scope of this was way bigger than what we think of as traditional publishers. Anyone who puts out data on the internet that can get scraped is going to be at risk of getting disintermediated.

 

AI has destroyed ad revenues from search for publishers. Can TollBit or other tools help in making it more viable to keep producing original content?

 

We have set cost per mille or cost per thousand visitor (CPM) rates as the basis for pricing. Publishers instantly understand that. From thinking about yield optimisation from their ads, they are now thinking about what to charge the AI crawlers and bots. But the price is not static – a paywalled article will be worth more than a non-paywalled one, new content will be worth more than older content.

 

Even within these verticals, finance commands a higher premium than entertainment and so on. We de-risk mispricing content because no one's locking themselves into a three-year long deal. Right now, this article was at a $10 CPM but in the next five minutes it can become a $15 CPM based on demand. It's fully dynamic.

 

Therefore, the TollBit model is way better at incentivising original content than the old world of search. If we design this market right, we could incentivise the creation of longer tail and differentiated content.

 

When you talk about publishers/clients are we largely talking about text or do you also do video, audio?

 

There's nothing stopping the technology from working for video. It is just that video has a lot more rights management considerations. For instance, what happens if a Nike logo shows up or can I use this person's name and image likeness? Those tend to be thornier. We will get there.

 

Could TollBit help tackle music and film piracy too?

 

The problem is unlike AI companies; you don't know who the pirates are and how do you get them to pay.

 

What have been the challenges?

 

It was very hard initially to talk to AI companies. In 2024, no AI company would ever use words like AI, content licensing, in the same sentence together. Now, the largest AI companies know that you need to figure a solution for this. You cannot keep scraping forever. The publisher tension was also very high and antagonistic to AI companies. The challenge was convincing that ‘we're actually trying to solve a problem for you.’

 

Your State of the Bots report refers to real-time scraping — meaning a bot is scraping as soon as I put in a query. How does it change the equation?

 

When you hear about AI applications, it's all retrieval augmented generation (RAG) — an AI framework that improves the AI response by retrieving data from external, trusted knowledge bases.

 

This could be internal company documents or databases. It reduces hallucinations and provides up-to-date information without retraining the model. The TollBit model is centred around being able to monetise the huge amount of real-time access that the bots need on the internet.

 

Some of these scrapes could take four seconds to 64 seconds, depending on the complexity of the site.

 

We tell them ‘if you came through TollBit, you would get it in less than 100 milliseconds. You don't have to wait.’ And by the way, a licence also comes with it.