Y Combinator Companies & Founders Scraper

Export the entire Y Combinator startup directory — every public company and its founders — as clean, structured JSON. Search or filter by batch, industry, region, status and hiring, or export all 6,000+ companies in one run. Each company can be enriched with founder names, titles, bios, LinkedIn and Twitter, company socials, open jobs, launches and news.

It reads Y Combinator's own Algolia index and page data — an official, unauthenticated path with no anti-bot — so runs are fast and reliable where HTML scrapers break.

Who uses this

• Investors & analysts — track every batch, industry and region; monitor hiring, status (Active / Acquired / Public) and new launches for deal flow.
• Sales & lead-gen teams — build targeted lists of founders with LinkedIn / Twitter and company websites, filtered by batch, industry or hiring status.
• PropTech / SaaS & AI builders — a stable JSON directory for enrichment pipelines, market maps, RAG and internal tools.
• Researchers & journalists — the full YC population, segmented by cohort.

Output fields

Field	Type	Description
name, slug, url	string	Company name, YC slug, YC profile URL
website	string	Company website
oneLiner, longDescription	string	Short and full company descriptions
batch, batchName	string	YC batch (e.g. Winter 2024)
industry, subindustry, industries	string / array	Industry classification
tags, regions, allLocations	array / string	Tags, regions, locations
status, stage	string	Company status and stage
teamSize, yearFounded, launchedAt	number	Size, founding year, launch epoch
topCompany, isHiring, nonprofit	boolean	YC flags
linkedinUrl, twitterUrl, facebookUrl, crunchbaseUrl, githubUrl	string	Company socials
logoUrl, logoThumbUrl	string	Company logo
founders	array	{name, title, bio, linkedinUrl, twitterUrl, avatarUrl} per founder
numFounders	number	Founder count
jobs, numJobs	array / number	Open roles at the company
launches, numLaunches	array / number	Launch YC posts
news, numNews	array / number	News items
scrapedAt	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp

Founder and social fields are populated when Include founders & full detail is enabled (the default).

High-value use cases

1. Founder lead lists — filter by batch + industry, enable founders, and export name + title + LinkedIn straight into your CRM or outreach tool.
2. Deal-flow monitoring — schedule a daily run sorted by launch date to catch every new YC company the day it goes public.
3. Market maps — export a whole vertical (e.g. Healthcare, Fintech, or the Artificial Intelligence tag) with team size, stage and status.
4. Hiring signals — filter isHiring to find companies actively growing, then pull their open roles from the jobs field.
5. Cohort research — export one or more batches end-to-end for analysis.

Input parameters

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchQuery	string	""	Free-text search; empty browses everything
batches	array	[]	Filter by YC batch(es)
industries	array	[]	Filter by industry
subindustries	array	[]	Filter by sub-industry
regions	array	[]	Filter by region
tags	array	[]	Filter by tag
status	array	[]	Active, Acquired, Public, Inactive
isHiring	boolean	false	Only hiring companies
topCompany	boolean	false	Only YC top companies
nonprofit	boolean	false	Only nonprofits
sort	enum	relevance	relevance or launch_date (newest)
scrapeAllBatches	boolean	false	Export the whole directory (bypasses the 1,000-per-query limit)
includeFounders	boolean	true	Enrich with founders, socials, jobs, launches, news
maxItems	integer	100	Cap the number of companies
proxyConfiguration	object	direct	Optional Apify proxy

Example input

{
    "industries": ["Fintech"],
    "isHiring": true,
    "sort": "launch_date",
    "includeFounders": true,
    "maxItems": 200
}

Example output (one row, truncated)

{
    "name": "Airbnb",
    "slug": "airbnb",
    "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/airbnb",
    "website": "http://airbnb.com",
    "batch": "Winter 2009",
    "industry": "Travel, Leisure and Tourism",
    "status": "Public",
    "teamSize": 6132,
    "isHiring": false,
    "linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/airbnb/",
    "founders": [
        {
            "name": "Brian Chesky",
            "title": "Co-founder & CEO",
            "linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianchesky/",
            "twitterUrl": "https://twitter.com/bchesky"
        }
    ],
    "numFounders": 3,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-08-17T12:00:00Z"
}

Export the whole directory

Set scrapeAllBatches: true to export every public company. The Actor iterates each YC batch behind the scenes to bypass the search API's 1,000-result-per-query limit and deduplicates by company, giving you the complete ~6,200-company dataset.

Scheduling & integrations

• Schedule daily/weekly runs from the Apify Console to keep a fresh dataset.
• Webhooks can trigger on run completion to push new rows into your systems.
• Export to JSON, CSV, Excel or Google Sheets, or pull results via the Apify API, or connect to Make, Zapier and n8n.

Use it from an AI agent (MCP)

This Actor works with the Apify MCP server, so assistants like Claude or ChatGPT can run it as a tool and receive the structured company/founder data directly — handy for research and enrichment agents.

FAQ

How many companies can I get? The full public directory is ~6,200 companies. Enable scrapeAllBatches to export them all; otherwise a single query returns up to 1,000 results.

Are founder contacts included? Yes — with includeFounders on (default), each company includes its founders with title, bio, LinkedIn and Twitter where YC publishes them.

How fresh is the data? Every run reads the live directory, so results reflect YC's current data at run time.

Is it reliable? It uses YC's own official data endpoints (no HTML scraping and no anti-bot to fight), so it is stable and fast.

Is this legal? The Actor collects only publicly available information from Y Combinator. You are responsible for using the data in line with YC's terms and applicable laws (e.g. GDPR/CCPA) — especially for personal data such as founder contacts.

Support? Issues and feature requests are welcome on the Actor's Issues tab.