Eric Ciarla

Eric Ciarla is co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of Firecrawl, the open-source API that crawls websites and returns clean, structured text for AI applications. Firecrawl’s about page says the team started in 2022 as part of Y Combinator, built Mendable and SideGuide earlier, and works from San Francisco, California.

Competing in Student Competitions at the University of New Hampshire

The University of New Hampshire’s Entrepreneurship Center, known as the ECenter, lists him as Eric Ciarla ’22 in a LinkedIn post. It says his team placed first in the Charles & Miriam Nelson Poster Competition with a project called MDRemindMe and was a semi-finalist in the Holloway Prize Competition with SideGuide, an online editor for trying out an API, per Firecrawl’s Y Combinator page. Firecrawl’s about page lists SideGuide among the products its team built before Firecrawl. The post adds that he was a regular in the ECenter Student Space, a member of the Entrepreneurship Club, and a hackathon winner.

Ciarla is quoted in the post: “Since leaving UNH and the ECenter, running a startup has been an amazing adventure. You learn something new every day and my experience as a Wildcat prepared me perfectly.”

Shutting Down Mendable for a Developer Product

Ciarla told the story of an earlier company, Mendable, in a LinkedIn post titled “We shut down Mendable and pivoted to Firecrawl.” He wrote: “Almost 2 years ago, we were building Mendable, which was one of the first chat with your data platforms.” Enterprise customers were signing on: “Big Fortune 500 companies were buying and we were taking off.”

Then the sales work stopped fitting the team. “Every sales call felt forced,” he wrote, and “We knew we had to go back to product-led dev tools.” On the reaction to the change, he wrote: “We pivoted and people thought we had lost it but we trusted our gut.” He closed the post with a lesson: “The takeaway here is Founder-Product fit matters just as much as Product-Market fit.” In it he also said Firecrawl has “over 250,000 users.”

Launching Firecrawl in a Weekend

On July 30, 2024, the three co-founders, who sign as Caleb, Nick, and Eric, introduced Firecrawl in a Launch YC post. They described Mendable as “one of the first managed RAG platforms used by companies like Coinbase, Snap, and MongoDB,” and said it taught them how much deployments depend on the quality of web data. “Conversations with industry peers revealed that they were rebuilding similar infrastructure,” they wrote. The post says: “We launched a cloud offering over a weekend in April, and in just three months, we’ve garnered over 8,000 GitHub stars.”

Paying Wikipedia for Access

On March 11, 2026, Ciarla wrote the Firecrawl blog post announcing a partnership with Wikimedia Enterprise. He said millions of requests for Wikipedia data flow through Firecrawl every month, and that Firecrawl now routes all of them through the Wikimedia Enterprise On-demand API, a paid service built for high-volume access.

He described the payment this way: “We’re paying for this access directly, contributing financially to the infrastructure that keeps Wikipedia running.” The post also says Firecrawl is developing a Creator Program to compensate content creators directly.