Startup secured $2M funding on June 26th, 2024
Content. Creating and releasing content comes with various pitfalls — monetization, licensing, protection from theft, and so on. But what about reader inquiries, and where does AI come into play? Today’s startup combines several different functions for content creators.
Core Idea
Dappier helps content creators and owners monetize their content in the “AI internet.” The basic monetization tool is licensing their content to AI creators through Dappier’s content marketplace. Dappier platform has three main killer features. First, content owners can license not only the content published on their website. They can upload other data, such as documents, databases, and other information storage, to the platform.
Second, during the upload process, the data is instantly transformed and prepared for use under the RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) model, which is currently the most popular method of “enhancing the brains” of universal LLM models by adding specific data.
As a result, developers can use the licensed third-party content in their AI without additional processing — obtaining it via the RAG API of the marketplace.
But why can only third-party developers use such processed and prepared content, rather than the content owners themselves? That’s the third feature of the platform! Owners of content uploaded to the platform get an easy way to use it in their own AI tools — chatbots, smart search, and recommendations on their own website or app.
For this, they only need to insert the ready-made Dappier widgets in the right places and connect them to the data through the platform’s API.
After that, for example, a reader of an online publication can ask the chatbot questions about the general topic of the publication or specific articles they’ve read.
The pricing varies, with several subscription options. More expensive plans include more AI agents to be created, a greater number of requests to their own AI agents per month, and a higher share of revenue from licensing their content to third-party developers through the marketplace.
In 2024, Dappier raised its first $2 million in investments.
fun Facts & Highlights
The beauty of this platform lies in combining two key functions in one place. Content owners can not only earn extra money by licensing their content to third-party developers, but also benefit from adding AI features (AI chatbots or smart search) to their own products.
So, what exactly is Dappier? A data marketplace with an added feature of creating AI tools based on your own content, or a platform for creating AI tools from your own data with an added opportunity to monetize this data through the marketplace?
Judging by the website, the startup seems to lean towards creating a data marketplace with an additional killer feature. However, the press release headline announcing Dappier’s launch in December 2023 said otherwise — that it’s a “platform for creating branded AI chats with additional monetization options.”
So, Dappier still needs to determine its platform positioning. This will depend on which offer resonates better with content owners and investors. It’s likely that the startup will decide on its positioning once they clearly understand what attracts investors and content owners more.
However, right now, the Dappier platform seems more attractive to owners than any of the extremes — whether it's purely a marketplace for licensing data or a platform purely for creating chatbots. At the same time, each of the extremes has already raised good investments.
The startup Direqt raised $5.9 million in funding for a platform to create AI chatbots for online publications.
The startup Human Native AI raised $3.6 million in 2024 for a marketplace to license content to third-party AI developers.
Almost simultaneously with Dappier, another marketplace for licensing data to third-party AI developers — Created By Humans — raised $5 million.
This startup started by licensing books and articles because one of its founders is Walter Isaacson, the author of famous biographies of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
We can also recall the startup TollBit. It didn’t create a separate marketplace, but made a platform that blocks requests from AI developers’ robots to content owners’ websites. Developers can unlock this access if they sign a data download payment agreement. This startup raised $7 million in its first investment round.
Where Are We Runnin’?
In the past, developers could download content for training their AIs from other people’s websites without obstacles. The first to raise concerns about this was the New York Times, suing OpenAI and Microsoft. After that, it was revealed that a contract worth $300 million was signed, in which Google licensed content from Reddit. Later, it turned out that the Shutterstock image library earned $104 million in 2023 from licensing its content. That’s when things really got started.
Money in content licensing is only increasing now. And as order is brought to this market, the amount of money will continue to grow exponentially — expanding its reach from just a few very large content owners to all others.
In other words, the market is growing (and already growing) explosively. So now is the time to get in if you want to grow rapidly through market growth, not just by your own efforts.
The Dappier model is great because it allows you to approach content owners, offering them quick and direct benefits from the simple process of creating their own AI agents from their own data, instead of vague promises of earning money by licensing their content to someone who might need it.
However, considering the potential opportunity to earn extra money, they might find using Dappier more profitable than a platform solely designed for creating AI agents.
Thus, replicating the Dappier model is a good way to enter the content licensing market, which is about to start growing explosively.
And if you come up with other features to combine with this, you might just grab a huge piece of this festive pie.
About Company
- Name: Dappier
- Website: dappier.com
- Latest Round: $2M, 06.26.2024
- Total Fundings: $2M, Rounds: 1