Web-scraping startup Firecrawl said on Tuesday that it raised $75 million in a Series B led by Smash Capital, with Altos Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Freestyle, and Offline Ventures participating.
The San Francisco-based company also launched Alexandria, a knowledge library that combines official data providers, custom connectors and Firecrawl's own indexes with the live web.
Alexandria gives AI agents a single way to find a source, see what it holds and pull from it. Its sources include Firecrawl’s Research, Developer and Government indexes, which the company says cover tens of millions of scientific paper abstracts, software sources, laws, regulations, and ordinances.
Firecrawl said agents using it scored 21% higher on answer quality than those using built-in web tools, citing an internal evaluation of 845 tasks with blind AI judging.
CEO Caleb Peffer wrote in a blog post that a "good chunk" of the funding will go toward buying knowledge from people. Firecrawl already pays data providers through individual agreements. It plans to open a self-service system for researchers, publishers, creators, and organizations to earn when agents use their work.
"That includes people whose expertise has never been shared online, and eventually could include AI agents making useful discoveries of their own," Peffer said. "We’ll keep investing in search and Alexandria by improving access to the live web, building deeper indexes, and retrieval systems and connecting more first-party sources," he added.
Firecrawl came out of Y Combinator in 2022. Its founders had previously built Mendable, an AI documentation product.
The company now says more than 1.5 million users build with its platform.
According to its website, the company has served more than 5 billion requests and plans to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue with fewer than 50 employees.