Firecrawl has closed its Series A funding round, led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and Y Combinator. For co-founder and CEO Caleb Peffer, the partnership with Nexus was sealed in an unusual moment.
During a coffee meeting with Nexus partner Abhishek Sharma at Blue Bottle in San Francisco’s South Park, Peffer became so animated while describing Firecrawl’s vision that he tipped over his chair. Sharma quickly caught both him and the chair mid-fall, a gesture Peffer says symbolized the kind of support founders look for in investors.
Launched in 2022 by Peffer, CTO Nicolas Silberstein Camara, and CMO Eric Ciarla, Firecrawl has become a widely used open source web crawler for developers and AI agents. A commercial version is available via API, and the tool has gained significant traction: over 350,000 developers use it, the project has nearly 50,000 GitHub stars, and customers include Shopify, Replit, Zapier, and several leading hedge funds. The company is already profitable, according to Peffer.
Earlier this month, Firecrawl rolled out an API with search functionality, with natural language prompt support coming soon, Camara said. The company’s new investor, Shopify’s Lütke, came on board after a bold cold email.
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When the founders noticed he had signed up to test Firecrawl through their self-serve platform, they reached out. Initially, he didn’t reply. But after Shopify’s team contacted Firecrawl about an enterprise contract, Peffer followed up directly with an investment pitch. This time, Lütke responded, and signed on.
Peffer described his involvement as “the best kind of validation.” Web crawlers have drawn scrutiny in the AI era, with concerns over scraping practices and disregard for robots.txt files. Firecrawl’s founders say they want to address those concerns by developing systems that allow content creators, publishers, and site owners to get compensated when AI models use their data. “We already have one side of the marketplace,” Peffer explained, noting that Firecrawl’s existing relationships with data scrapers position the company to connect them with rights holders.
The startup also made headlines earlier this year for posting what may have been the first job listing for an AI agent, offering a $15,000 salary. The experiment drew widespread attention but didn’t result in a hire. Firecrawl then raised the budget to $1 million to test multiple AI agents and their developers, but the team concluded that managing such hires is a complex challenge. They are now looking for an AI chief of staff to help run those efforts.
