YC Company Hiring Monitor

Monitor public Y Combinator company profiles for hiring and company-profile changes. The Actor is designed for scheduled recruiting, sales, and market-intelligence workflows and uses the public YC directory without a browser or proxy.

What it detects

• New companies matching your filters
• Companies that start or stop hiring
• Team-size changes
• Company-status changes
• Website changes

Each dataset row includes the current company profile, a primary changeType, all detected changeTypes, and webhook-friendly previousValue / currentValue objects.

Recommended setup

1. Run once with baselineOnly: true to save the current state without emitting rows.
2. Create an Apify schedule (daily is a practical default) with baselineOnly: false and emitChangesOnly: true.
3. Optionally connect the dataset to a webhook or integration.

State is stored in the run's default key-value store under YC_COMPANY_STATE_V1. Scheduled runs must reuse the same default storage to compare against the prior baseline.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	100	Maximum companies fetched and compared per run (1–2,000).
hiringOnly	boolean	true	Limit results to companies currently marked as hiring. Disable it to detect stopped-hiring transitions.
baselineOnly	boolean	false	Save current state and emit no dataset rows. Use this for the first scheduled run.
emitChangesOnly	boolean	true	After a baseline exists, emit only new or changed companies.
batches	string[]	[]	Exact YC batch facets, such as S24 or W25.
industries	string[]	[]	Exact YC directory industry facets.
regions	string[]	[]	Exact YC directory region facets.
statuses	string[]	[]	Exact YC company-status facets.

Empty filter arrays mean “all values.” Multiple values within one facet are ORed; different facet groups are ANDed.

First-run baseline

{
  "maxItems": 500,
  "hiringOnly": false,
  "baselineOnly": true,
  "emitChangesOnly": true,
  "batches": ["S24", "W25"]
}

Daily hiring-change monitor

{
  "maxItems": 500,
  "hiringOnly": false,
  "baselineOnly": false,
  "emitChangesOnly": true,
  "batches": ["S24", "W25"]
}

Use hiringOnly: false when you need both newlyHiring and stoppedHiring events. With hiringOnly: true, companies that leave the filtered search results cannot be observed as stopped hiring.

Output

Dataset records contain:

• Identity: companyId, name, slug, ycProfileUrl
• Profile: website, batch, status, stage, location, industries, oneLiner
• Hiring signals: isHiring, teamSize
• Change metadata: changeType, changeTypes, previousValue, currentValue, detectedAt

The OUTPUT key-value-store record provides a compact run summary:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "inspected": 100,
  "emitted": 3,
  "baselineOnly": false,
  "hadPreviousBaseline": true,
  "detectedAt": "2026-09-17T09:00:00.000Z"
}

Operational notes

• The Actor discovers YC's public search configuration at runtime rather than embedding credentials.
• Requests retry transient failures and respect Retry-After responses.
• maxItems bounds request volume and state growth.
• The Actor reports changes only among records returned by the current filters. Keep filters stable between scheduled runs for clean comparisons.
• Data comes from public YC directory profiles and may be incomplete or delayed. Verify signals before contacting a company or making decisions.