Linkup's service is particularly beneficial for smaller AI companies and content publishers that lack the resources to navigate the shift from a scraping model to a licensing model. The startup, which recently raised a €3 million seed round, plans to focus on corporate and business information and works with knowledge databases in addition to news websites. It competes with other startups like ScalePost that are also working on bringing premium content to LLMs through licensing contracts.
Key takeaways:
- French startup Linkup is developing an API that allows developers to access web content from premium, trusted sources to enhance the responses of large language models (LLMs) in AI chatbots, a process known as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
- The future of web scraping bots is uncertain due to increasing regulatory scrutiny and potential legal issues, as these bots often lift content from the web without financial agreements with content publishers.
- Linkup acts as an intermediary between content publishers and companies that want to augment their LLM responses with web content, signing content licensing deals with publishers and paying them based on how often their content is accessed by Linkup clients.
- Linkup recently raised a €3 million seed round and plans to hire an additional 10 staff over the next year. The startup is focusing on corporate and business information and works with knowledge databases in addition to news websites.