AI crawler Firecrawl raises $14.5M, is still looking to hire agents as employees

Summary

Firecrawl’s co-founder and CEO Caleb Peffer knew the exact moment he found the investor to lead his Series A. He was in a coffee meeting with Nexus Venture Partner’s Abhishek Sharma at the Blue Bottle in San Francisco’s South Park (a favorite VC haunt). While describing the future of the company, he was gesturing so animatedly that his chair tipped over. “I actually fell out of my chair. And Abhishek, as a great Investor does, caught the chair and me as I was falling,” Peffer described with a laugh. That felt like a symbol for how the founder/investor relationship is supposed to work. “I think that was a clear signal that he was the right partner.” On Tuesday, Firecrawl announced a Series A led by Nexus with participation from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and existing investor Y Combinator. Firecrawl offers a popular open-source web crawler for developers and AI agents, with a commercially supported version available through API. It’s used by 350,000 developers, has nearly 50,000 stars on GitHub and its notable customers include Shopify, Replit, and Zapier as well as “some of the largest hedge funds in the world,” Peffer told TechCrunch. And, he says, the company is already profitable. The startup also just released an API that supports search and will soon add support for natural language prompts, as co-founder and CTO Nicolas Silberstein Camara noted. Peffer, who co-founded Firecrawl in 2022 with Camara and CMO Eric Ciarla, said gaining Lütke as an investor was “the best kind of validation.” Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 They landed him through a gutsy email after discovering the Shopify founder had signed up to try their product through their self-service portal. “We saw his email come in,” Peffer said. The Firecrawl crew immediately emailed him to welcome him as a customer, but got no response. Two months later, some Shopify folks contacted Firecrawl for an enterprise contract. So Peffer took his shot and emailed Lütke again, mentioning they’d...