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

Firecroll’s co-founder and CEO Kaleb Pepher found out the investor to lead in his series in his series.

He was in a coffee meeting with Nexus Venture Partner Abhishek Sharma in San Francisco South Park’s Blue Bottle (Dear VC Hunt). While describing the future of the company, he was so animated that his chair was over.

“I actually fell from my chair. It was felt as a symbol of the founders/investors’ relationships.” I think it was a clear signal that he was the right partner. “

On Tuesday, Firecol Shopif’s CEO Tobius Lotke and existing investor Wi -Combinator announced a series led by Nexus.

API provides a popular open-source web crawler for developers and AI agents with commercially supported versions. It is used by the developer of 350,000, there is approximately 50,000 stars Githab and its notable customers, as well as Shopphi, Reflit and Japia, have told Pepher TechCrunch, some of the largest hedge funds in the world. And, he says the company is already profitable.

Startup has barely published an API that supports the search and will soon add support for natural language requests, such as co-founder and CTO Nicholas Silberstein Kamara.

Pepher, who co-founded firecol with Kamara and CMO Eric Searla in 2022, said that the best type of legitimacy as an investor was to be an investor.

The founder of Shopiffs signed up to try their products through their self-service portal they landed him through a bold email.

“We saw her email coming,” said Pepher. The firecrow crew emailed him immediately to welcome him as a customer, but did not receive any response. Two months later, some shopiffs contacted the firecrow for the enterprise deal. So Pepher emailed the pendant with his shot again, mentioned that they would like him to take part in their upcoming round.

This time, the lot reacted to the lot by praising their products. He was

When the AI Web crawler Nowadays somewhat suspicious reputation, Due to most bad actors Ignore that robot.Text filesThey are also a essential part of the Burdwan AI world. AI train on the web, Agents need to access web pages to perform their dutiesAnd personalized crawlers need to consume their own websites to train and manage the initiatives.

Firecol founders are hoping to help solve the frustrating parts of their industry. They are working on the equipment to help website owners, publishers and other material manufacturers “AI gets paid when they use their content. We think it should be,” said Pepher.

Although there have been a lot of effort around this concept from big names Adobe and Getty As well as startups Brie, Calloop networkAnd others, Pepher thinks that there is an edge of the firecrow because it is already working with those who are scraping data.

“We already have a aspect of the marketplace,” he said. “What we want to do is that the market is just to attach the website owners, publishers” “

Interestingly, the firecrow also went viral for very little related reasons with their open source equipment a few months ago. They had a post The advertisement of the YC Job Board is looking for an AI agent to recruit $ 15,000 as an employee – Perhaps an agent is probably the first job ad for employees.

No agents were found to hire in this job search, so Firecroled had made up the budget Several agents and developers made by them and Million to try again 1 million dollars. Applicants were flooded, Pepher said, but the company has not yet appointed. The founders realized that evaluating and managing agent staff was one of themselves. So now they are looking for an AI Chief of Staff.

The PEFER of the Firecroll will Stay on stage when disrupted in October He has learned what he has learned in a session that covers the benefits of appointing AI agents as elementary employees.