Web crawling startup Firecrawl has secured $14.5 million in Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and Y Combinator. The company's open-source web crawler has gained significant traction, attracting 350,000 developers and earning nearly 50,000 GitHub stars.

Founded in 2022, Firecrawl addresses a critical need in the AI ecosystem: reliable access to web data. The platform serves major clients, including Shopify, Replit, and Zapier, providing clean, structured web data through a simple API. According to CEO Caleb Peffer, the company is already profitable and has grown in size by 15x in the past year.

The startup just launched the next generation of its scraper, with 10x faster scraping capabilities, semantic crawling that accepts natural language prompts, and enhanced search functionality. Their proprietary Fire-Engine technology delivers 33% faster speeds and 40% higher success rates than competitors.

Beyond technical improvements, Firecrawl is developing a marketplace to ensure content creators are paid when AI systems use their work—addressing a growing concern about fair compensation in the AI training ecosystem.

The company made headlines earlier for attempting to hire AI agents as employees, first posting an ad in the YC job board for an AI agent employee with a $15,000 salary, and then offering up to $1 million for capable agents and their developers.