Ai Crawler Firecrawl Raises $14.5m, Is Still Looking To Hire Agents As Employees

Firecrawl’s co-founder and CEO Caleb Peffer knew nan nonstop infinitesimal he recovered nan investor to lead his Series A. 

He was successful a java gathering pinch Nexus Venture Partner’s Abhishek Sharma astatine nan Blue Bottle successful San Francisco’s South Park (a favourite VC haunt). While describing nan early of nan company, he was gesturing truthful animatedly that his chair tipped over. 

“I really fell retired of my chair. And Abhishek, arsenic a awesome Investor does, caught nan chair and maine arsenic I was falling,” Peffer described pinch a laugh. That felt for illustration a awesome for really nan founder/investor narration is expected to work. “I deliberation that was a clear awesome that he was nan correct partner.”

On Tuesday, Firecrawl announced a Series A led by Nexus pinch information from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and existing investor Y Combinator.

Firecrawl offers a celebrated open-source web crawler for developers and AI agents, pinch a commercially supported type disposable done API. It’s utilized by 350,000 developers, has astir 50,000 stars connected GitHub and its notable customers see Shopify, Replit, and Zapier arsenic good arsenic “some of nan largest hedge costs successful nan world,” Peffer told TechCrunch. And, he says, nan institution is already profitable.

The startup besides conscionable released an API that supports hunt and will soon adhd support for earthy connection prompts, arsenic co-founder and CTO Nicolas Silberstein Camara noted.

Peffer, who co-founded Firecrawl successful 2022 pinch Camara and CMO Eric Ciarla, said gaining Lütke arsenic an investor was “the champion benignant of validation.” 

They landed him done a gutsy email aft discovering nan Shopify laminitis had signed up to effort their merchandise done their self-service portal.

“We saw his email travel in,” Peffer said. The Firecrawl unit instantly emailed him to invited him arsenic a customer, but sewage nary response. Two months later, immoderate Shopify folks contacted Firecrawl for an endeavor contract. So Peffer took his changeable and emailed Lütke again, mentioning they’d emotion for him to participate successful their upcoming round.  

This time, Lütke responded pinch compliments astir their product. He was in.

While AI web crawlers person a somewhat dubious estimation these days, mostly owed to bad actors that disregard robot.txt files, they are besides a basal portion of nan burgeoning AI world. AI trains connected nan web, agents request to entree web pages to execute their duties, and enterprises request personalized crawlers to devour their ain websites for training and operations.

The Firecrawl founders besides dream to thief reside nan frustrating parts of their industry. They are moving connected devices to thief website owners, publishers, and different contented creators “get paid erstwhile AI uses their content. We deliberation this is nan measurement it should be,” Peffer said.

While location person been tons of efforts astir this thought from large names for illustration Adobe and Getty arsenic good arsenic startups for illustration Bria, Calliope Networks, and others, Peffer feels that Firecrawl has an separator because it’s already moving pinch those who are scraping data. 

“We already person 1 broadside of nan marketplace,” he said. “What we want to do is conscionable link that broadside of nan marketplace to nan website owners, nan publishers.”

Interestingly, Firecrawl besides went viral a fewer months agone for reasons that person small to do pinch their unfastened root tool. They had posted an ad to nan YC occupation committee looking to prosecute an AI supplier arsenic an worker for a $15,000 net – possibly nan first occupation advertisement for an supplier employee, ever.

That occupation hunt didn’t output an supplier worthy hiring, truthful Firecrawled upped nan fund to up $1 cardinal to prosecute respective agents and nan developers who built them, and tried again. Applicants flooded in, Peffer said, but nan institution hasn’t yet hired any. The founders realized that evaluating and managing wanna-be supplier labor is simply a occupation successful itself. So now they are looking for an AI main of staff. 

Firecrawl’s Peffer will be connected shape astatine Disrupt successful October to talk each that he’s learned successful a convention that covers nan pros and cons of hiring AI agents arsenic early employees.