Co -founder and CEO of Firecrawl Caleb Peffer knew the exact moment he found the investor leading A.
He was in a coffee meeting with Abhishek Sharma of his partner Nexus Venture in the blue bottle in South Park, San Francisco (a favorite haunt VC). While describing the future of the company, he gestured so moving that his chair could fly.
“I really fell out of my chair. And Abhishek, as a big investor does, grabbed the chair and I, as they fell,” Peffer describes with laughter. This felt like a symbol of how the founder/investor relationship must work. “I think this was a clear message that he was the right partner.”
On Tuesday, Firecrawl announced an A -led by Nexus with the participation of Shopify’s CEO Tobias Lütke and the existing Y Combinator investor.
Firecrawl offers a popular open source open source for AI developers and agents, with a commercially supported version available through API. Used by 350,000 developers, has almost 50,000 stars GitHub and its remarkable customers include shopify, replit and zapier as well as “some of the largest hazardous hazard in the world,” Peffer told TechCrunch. And, he says, the company is already profitable.
The start has just been released an API that supports the search and will soon add support for the natural language prompts, as co -founder and CTO Nicolas Silberstein Camara noted.
Peffer, who founded Fiencrawl in 2022 with Camara and CMO Eric Ciarla, said that winning Lütke as an investor was “the best type of ratification”.
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They landed him through a fragile email after discovering that the founder of Shopify had registered to test their product through the self -care gate.
“We saw his email coming,” Peffer said. The Firecrawl crew immediately sent him an email to welcome him as a customer, but he received no answer. Two months later, some Shopify peoples came into contact with Firecrawl for a business contract. So Peffer again took his shot and sent Lütke, saying they would like to take part in their upcoming round.
This time, Lütke responded with congratulations on their product. It was in.
While AI tissue detectors have a somewhat doubtful reputation these days, mainly due to bad actors who ignore robots. The AI trains on the internet, agents must have access to websites to perform their duties and businesses need personalized detectors to consume their own websites for education and businesses.
Firecrawl founders also hope to help deal with the frustrating departments of their industry. They work on tools to help owners of websites, publishers and other content creators “get paid when AI uses their content. We believe this is the way they should be,” Peffer said.
While there were many attempts about this idea of big names such as Adobe and Getty, as well as newly established businesses such as Bria, Calliope networksAnd others, Peffer thinks Firecrawl has an advantage because he already works with those who scratch data.
“We already have one side of the market,” he said. “What we want to do is simply connect that side of the market with site owners, publishers.”
Interestingly, Fiersecrawl also went a few months ago for reasons that have nothing to do with the open source tool. They had published an ad in the YC Labor Council who want to hire an AI agent as a salary employee – perhaps the first job advertisement for an employee.
This job search did not perform an agent worth hiring, so Firecrawled increased the budget to increase $ 1 million to hire several agents and developers who built them and tried again. The candidates have been flooded, Peffer said, but the company has not yet hired anyone. The founders realized that the evaluation and management of Wanna-Be’s employees is a job in itself. So now they are looking for a AI staff leader.
Firecrawl’s Peffer will be on stage during the October disorder to discuss everything he has learned at a session covering the advantages and disadvantages of AI delegates as early employees.
