Firecrawl raises $75M Series B led by Smash Capital for AI agent data library

Firecrawl Inc., a startup that builds web scraping tools for artificial intelligence agents, has raised $75 million in a Series B round led by Smash Capital, a Los Angeles-based venture capital firm. Y Combinator, Altos Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Freestyle and Offline Ventures also joined the round.

What the platform does

An agent can in theory gather web data with an ordinary browser, but collecting it at scale runs into practical obstacles. Firecrawl offers an agent-oriented search engine that filters pages by creation date, hosted file types and other parameters, which the company says is more efficient than search engines built for people.

Pages that load in several phases often confuse conventional scrapers, which may download content before loading finishes and return poor data; Firecrawl says its "smart wait" feature handles that. The platform can also scroll, click interface elements and submit forms on its own, and developers can describe the desired behaviour in a prompt. It extracts details from PDFs, Word documents and other files, and can watch chosen pages for changes — tracking a rival's pricing page, for example.

Alexandria and the data question

Alongside the funding, Firecrawl introduced Alexandria, a cloud service that mixes web data with material from third-party providers and datasets the company curates itself. One set holds tens of millions of scientific paper abstracts; another contains a comparable number of code and documentation files. The point is to fill gaps the open web leaves: a coding assistant, for instance, could enrich examples found on a developer forum with explanations from a curated technical dataset.

Developers normally need a separate connector for every source they combine. Firecrawl says all Alexandria data is reachable through one interface, cutting the amount of custom code required.

Where the capital goes

Most of the new funding will go toward adding data from more third-party providers, and the company plans to launch a self-service content licensing system soon to speed up those deals. Y Combinator, an existing backer, said more than 1.5 million people now build on Firecrawl's API.