Firecrawl Raises $14.5M, Aims to Hire Agents as Employees

Firecrawl, a web crawler for developers and AI agents, has raised $14.5M in a Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and existing investor Y Combinator. The company offers a popular open-source web crawler with a commercially supported version available through API, and has 350,000 developers using it, including notable customers like Shopify, Replit, and Zapier. Firecrawl is already profitable and plans to add search and natural language prompt support to its API.

Firecrawl, a developer platform specializing in web data access for AI agents, has raised $14.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners. The round also included participation from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and existing investor Y Combinator. The company offers a popular open-source web crawler with a commercially supported version available through API, boasting over 350,000 developers as users, including notable clients such as Shopify, Replit, and Zapier [1].

Founded in 2022 by Caleb Peffer, Eric Ciarla, and Nicolas Silberstein Camara, Firecrawl aims to simplify web data access for developers and AI teams. The company's proprietary Fire-Engine technology delivers structured web data 33% faster and with 40% higher success rates than existing solutions, making it a key partner for enterprises, research labs, and AI startups [2].

The Series A funding will be used to fuel Firecrawl's growth, drive product innovation, and expand its global team of engineers and AI specialists. The company also plans to explore licensed partnerships that allow content owners to earn directly when their paywalled content powers AI, building a sustainable, profitable model for high-quality content on the web [2].

With over 43,000 GitHub stars, Firecrawl is one of the most popular open-source projects, and its innovative features such as search, intelligent crawling, and natural-language data extraction have made it a go-to tool for AI agents, chatbots, and competitive intelligence systems [2].

References:
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/19/ai-crawler-firecrawl-raises-14-5m-is-still-looking-to-hire-agents-as-employees/
[2] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/08/19/3135573/0/en/Firecrawl-Announces-14-5-Million-in-Series-A-Funding-to-Put-Web-Data-on-Tap-for-AI-Agents.html