Firecrawl co-founder and CEO Caleb Peffer knew the exact moment investors were leading Series A.
He was at a coffee meeting with Abhishek Sharma of Nexus Venture Partner at Blue Bottle (his favorite VC Hunt) in San Francisco. While explaining the future of the company, he was gestured so animatedly that his chair was turned over.
“I actually fell out of my chair, and Abhishek caught the chair and me while I was falling,” explained Peffer with a laugh. It felt like a symbol of how founder/investment relationships work. “I think it was a clear signal that he was the right partner.”
On Tuesday, Firecrawl announced Series A, led by Nexus, and announced its participation from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and existing investor Y combinators.
Firecrawl offers popular open source web crawlers for developers and AI agents, with commercially supported versions available through APIs. It is used by 350,000 developers, and has nearly 50,000 stars on Github, with notable customers including Shopify, Replit, Zapier and “some of the world’s largest hedge funds.” And he says the company is already making profits.
The startup has also just released an API to support search, and will soon add support for natural language prompts as co-founder and CTO Nicholas Silversteinkamara pointed out.
Peffer, who co-founded Firecrawl in 2022 with Camara and CMO Eric Ciarla, said that getting Lütke as an investor is “the best test.”
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They landed him through brave email after discovering that Shopify founders had signed up to try out the products via a self-service portal.
“I saw his email coming in,” Peffer said. The Firecrawl crew immediately emailed him to welcome him as a customer, but there was no response. Two months later, some Shopify people contacted Firecrawl for an enterprise deal. So Peffer took his shot and emailed Lucke again, saying they love him to join in the upcoming rounds.
This time, Lütke responded with a compliment on their products. He was in.
AI Web Crawlers have recently had a somewhat questionable reputation for bad actors ignoring the Robot.txt file, but it is also a necessary part of the burgeoning AI world. AI trains on the web, agents need to access web pages to perform their duties, and companies need personalized crawlers to consume their own websites for training and operations.
The founders of Firecrawl want to help them deal with frustrating parts of the industry. They are working on tools to help website owners, publishers and other content creators “would be working on a tool to help AI get paid when they use their content. I think this is the way it should be,” says Peffer.
There has been a lot of effort on the idea from big names like Adobe and Getty, but Firecrawl feels it has an advantage as startups like Bria and Calliope Networks work with people cutting data.
“We already have one side of the market,” he said. “What we want to do is connect that aspect of the market to the publisher that owns the website.”
Interestingly, Firecrawl went viral a few months ago for reasons that have little to do with open source tools. They were aiming to post ads on the YC job board and hire an AI agent as an employee on a salary of $15,000. It is probably the first job ad for an agent employee.
That job hunt didn’t bring any agents worthy of employment, so Firecrawl increased its budget to $1 million, hired multiple agents and the developers who built them, and tried again. The applicant has been flooded, Peffer said, but the company has not yet hired. The founder realized that evaluating and managing the agents’ employees who want to be agents is their job. So now they are looking for the AI Chief of Staff.
Firecrawl’s Peffer appeared on the Disrupt stage in October to discuss everything he learned in the session covering the pros and cons of hiring AI agents as early employees.
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