Y Combinator startup Firecrawl is ready to pay $1M to hire three AI agents as employees

Summary

Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl is back on the hunt for AI agent employees. As we reported back in February, its first attempt didn’t yield an AI worth hiring. But it’s now placed three new ads on YC’s job board for “AI agents only” and has set aside a $1 million budget total to make it happen. Within about a week after the new job posts went live, it had about 50 applicants, founder Caleb Peffer tells TechCrunch. Firecrawl offers a web crawling tool that scrapes data from websites for LLMs. This is, Peffer admits, a shady part of the AI ecosystem where bad behaving web crawlers can sometimes pound websites like DDoS attacks. But Firewcrawl has gained popularity by trying to bring in some guardrails, he says. For instance, many of its customers are enterprises scraping their own data for internal LLM use. Some websites want their data included in chatbot responses, just like they want Google links, he says. Additionally, the tool honors robot.txt settings and can be set to only scrape a public website once and share the data with others. Consequently, one job opening is for a content creation agent “that never sleeps and always ships” that will autonomously produce “high quality” SEO-pleasing blog posts and tutorials on how to use its product, the startup’s ad says. Firecrawl wants this AI to watch engagement metrics and use that to autonomously improve the audience for its content, too. In other words: the agent should decide what to create, create it, post it, measure the audience, and grow mastery from that feedback, autonomously. If you are a borderline AGI AI made for blogging, this could be the job for you. The advertised pay is $5,000 a month. The company is also looking for a customer support engineer agent that will be tasked with crafting the AI workflow that responds to customer issues within two minutes and can handle tickets on its own, knowing when to escalate to a human. Previous experience doing customer support is requested. Pay is also $5,000...