Firecrawl just closed its Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners, with Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke joining the round.
The startup offers a popular open-source web crawler used by 350,000 developers, boasting nearly 50,000 stars on GitHub. Big names like Shopify, Replit, Zapier, and top hedge funds rely on Firecrawl’s API-driven crawler, which is already profitable.
Co-founder and CEO Caleb Peffer revealed the Nexus deal started with an unforgettable coffee meeting in San Francisco where he literally fell out of his chair—caught by Nexus partner Abhishek Sharma. That moment sealed the partnership. 
Firecrawl recently launched a search-supporting API and plans to add natural language prompt support soon, co-founder and CTO Nicolas Silberstein Camara said.
The company snagged Shopify’s Lütke as an investor after spotting his signup on their self-service portal. Peffer shot a bold email invite for the funding round, and Lütke responded with praise.
AI web crawlers are controversial but critical for training AI and powering agents. Firecrawl wants to help website owners and publishers get paid when their content is used for AI. Peffer said:
“We think this is the way it should be.”
Firecrawl’s edge? They already have one side of the marketplace—the scrapers—and want to link them to content owners.
The startup also made headlines for posting a job ad to hire AI agents as employees, starting with a $15,000 offer, then raising it to $1 million to hire agents plus their developers. That search hit a snag—managing AI agents is its own challenge, so now they want an AI chief of staff.
Peffer will share insights on AI agents as early hires at TechCrunch Disrupt in October.
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