Three researchers, one journalist, and a frustrated procurement officer walked into a room. By the end of the week we had a prototype. By the end of the month we had stopped opening tabs altogether. This is the company we wish existed when we started.
A search engine wants you on a search engine. A social platform wants you scrolling. A news site wants ad impressions. The fastest way to find anything meaningful is to escape all of them, at once, in parallel. That's what CRWLA does.
We don't generate answers. We don't write your report. We find everything that's there and hand it to you, in one place, ranked by how useful it is to you — not to the platform that hosts it.
It started with a market scan. One of us was researching cement pricing across West Africa for a client — six countries, fourteen suppliers, three news outlets per region. By tab forty-two, we gave up and started taking screenshots. By tab sixty, the laptop fan had become an instrument. The work that should have taken a morning took three days.
That weekend we wrote a script. It pasted keywords into search engines, scraped headlines, dropped them in a spreadsheet. It was ugly. It worked. Three colleagues asked for it. Then six. Then a whole agency wanted a version with sharing built in.
We kept building. The script became a tool. The tool became a workspace. The workspace became CRWLA. Today it's used by journalists chasing leads across newsrooms, marketing teams monitoring brand sentiment, procurement officers comparing vendors across socials, and one political campaign team we definitely cannot name.
We're still small. We're still based out of Lagos and Abuja. We still use the product ourselves every day — usually before coffee — and we still fix the bugs the same morning we find them.
Ex-journalist. Spent five years writing about Nigerian banks before deciding the research tools were the actual story.
Built the first crawler over a weekend. Maintains the search engine and most of his sleep deprivation single-handedly.
Reformed UX researcher at a consumer bank. Now spends her days interviewing power users about why they hate tab bars.