Dappier Inc., a startup helping publishers license their content to artificial intelligence developers, today announced that it has raised $2 million in seed funding.

Early-stage venture capital firm Silverton Partners led the investment.

Austin-based Dappier operates a marketplace through which publishers can make their content available to developers for use in AI projects. According to the company, datasets are provided under a pay-as-you-go pricing model in which customers are charged per query. The price of queries is set by the publisher that created the dataset being accessed.

Besides providing monetization tools, Dappier also simplifies the more technical tasks involved in making data available for AI projects.

Before a collection of records can be inputted into neural networks, it has to be organized into a form that is easier to process. Dappier promises to automate the task by providing a set of prepackaged data models. Those are files that define how the individual records in a dataset should be organized.

Publishers can upload their content to Dappier’s marketplace through a no-code interface. The platform can retrieve articles from RSS feeds as well as databases, documents and Airtable, a popular cloud-based collaboration platform. From there, it automatically organizes the files for processing using the built-in data models.

The company says its marketplace is compatible with AI models that implement RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation. RAG is a machine learning technique that enables neural networks to access data from external systems. The technique allows developers to make new information available for their AI models without retraining them, which reduces costs.

According to Dappier, its platform can also simplify publishers’ in-house AI projects. Website operators that sell their data through the platform use it to build AI-powered search and content recommendation features for their readers.

Dappier will spend the proceeds from its seed round on product development. In particular, the company plans to provide more ways for publishers to upload their content to its platform. It will also work to grow the amount of data available to AI developers. 

“Dappier Marketplace allows publishers to easily make their data accessible to AI agents, and then license directly – ensuring fair compensation for the content that fuels improved AI experiences,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Dan Goikhman.

Content licensing has emerged as a major priority for AI providers. Last year, OpenAI inked a deal with Politico and Insider parent company Axel Springer SE to make news articles available for its large language models. The ChatGPT developer has since announced similar licensing agreements with Vox Media Inc., The Atlantic and several other publishers.

AI developers’ efforts to source more training data for their language models also extends beyond news. Both OpenAI and Google LLC are reportedly paying $60 million annually to Reddit Inc. in exchange for access to content from its social network. Separately, the two companies have signed deals to license Stack Overflow’s coding advice repository.

Image: Dappier