Firecrawl Raises $14.5 Million to Expand AI Web-Data Platform

Firecrawl, a San Francisco-based startup that provides an open-source web-crawling platform for artificial-intelligence applications, has raised $14.5 million in Series A financing led by Nexus Venture Partners. Shopify chief executive Tobias Lütke and existing backer Y Combinator also joined the round, bringing the company’s total funding to about $16 million. Founded in 2022 by Caleb Peffer, Nicolas Silberstein Camara and Eric Ciarla, Firecrawl says its tools let developers search, crawl and extract structured data from the web with a single API call. The company’s service is used by roughly 350,000 developers, has processed more than one billion requests and has amassed almost 50,000 stars on GitHub. Management says the business is already profitable. The fresh capital will be used to hire staff and accelerate product development, including the newly launched Firecrawl v2 search API, which the company claims delivers web data to AI agents significantly faster than previous versions. Firecrawl is also exploring features to help content owners receive payment when their material is used to train AI systems.