🚀 Y Combinator Scraper

Extract public Y Combinator directory data from native filters or a pasted directory URL. Get clean, structured companies, founders, open jobs, and Launch YC posts for lead generation, founder outreach, recruiting, and startup market research.

The YC directory lists 6,200+ funded startups with rich public detail—batch, industry, team size, location, YC partner, social links, hiring status, founders, and job openings—but reviewing them one by one does not scale. This Actor works through the directory for you and returns clean, normalized records ready to export. No login, YC account, browser extension, or manual copying required.

🎯 Who uses it?

📇 Sales and lead-generation teams

Build targeted lists of startups by batch, industry, region, or hiring status, with founder names and LinkedIn profiles for outreach.

🧑‍💼 Recruiters and talent teams

Track which YC companies are hiring, pull full job descriptions with salary, equity, visa, and skills, and reach the hiring manager.

📈 VCs and market researchers

Monitor new batches, map categories and trends across the portfolio, and analyze team sizes, stages, and locations.

🗂️ Data analysts and journalists

Build exportable datasets about YC companies, founders, launches, and hiring across every batch since 2005.

✨ What it does

• Native filters: Select companies by batch, industry, region, tag, keyword, hiring status, top-company, or non-profit—no URL needed.
• Directory URL: Paste a link from the YC directory address bar (including /companies/industry/...) to reuse filters you set on the site.
• Founder detail: Fetches every company profile for founders, YC partner, location, year founded, social links, photos, and videos.
• Open jobs: Optionally attach each open role with full description, interview process, location, remote flag, salary, equity, experience, visa, skills, and hiring manager.
• Launch YC posts and news: Optionally attach launch posts with full body text and press mentions.
• Handles any size: collect a single batch or the entire directory in one run — you never manage pages or limits by hand.
• CRM-ready layout: Choose one row per company (founders and jobs nested) or one row per founder (company flattened onto every contact).

📦 What data you get

Each record exposes the public fields YC provides at collection time. Key fields include:

Entity	Useful data
Company	Name, YC profile URL, website, tagline and full description, batch, industry, sub-industry, tags, stage, status, team size, year founded, top-company and non-profit flags, location, city, country, regions, YC partner, hiring status, open-job count, LinkedIn, X, GitHub, Crunchbase, Facebook, logo, photos, demo-day and product videos, former names, launch date.
Founders	Name, title, bio, LinkedIn, X, avatar, YC founder ID.
Open jobs	Title, role, type, location, remote flag, salary range, equity range, experience, minimum school year, visa, skills, full description, interview process, hiring manager, posting age, job URL, apply URL.
Launch YC posts	Title, tagline, full body, URL, date.
News	Title, URL, date.

Every record includes scraped_at, the UTC time it was collected, and source (listing or profile). Download your Dataset from Apify as CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

💡 Use cases

📇 Build a lead list for the latest batch

Filter to a batch and companies that are hiring, then take founders for outreach.

{
  "searchMode": "filters",
  "batches": ["Summer 2026"],
  "isHiring": true,
  "maxItems": 500,
  "scrapeFounders": true
}

🧑‍💼 Pull every open engineering role in a batch

Attach jobs with full descriptions and export one row per founder for your CRM.

{
  "searchMode": "filters",
  "batches": ["Winter 2025"],
  "scrapeJobs": true,
  "outputMode": "founder"
}

📈 Snapshot an industry across all batches

Leave the batch empty and filter by industry; the Actor shards the directory automatically.

{
  "searchMode": "filters",
  "industries": ["Healthcare"],
  "maxItems": 2000,
  "scrapeFounders": true
}

🔗 Reuse a filter you built on the site

{
  "searchMode": "url",
  "directoryUrl": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026&isHiring=true",
  "maxItems": 250
}

⚙️ Quick setup

Set searchMode and fill in one block—filters or directoryUrl. The unused block is ignored.

• How to select companies: filters builds the search from the fields below; url reads them from a pasted directory link.
• Filters: batches, industries, regions, tags, query, isHiring, topCompany, nonprofit. Leave all empty to take the whole directory (~6,200 companies).
• Maximum companies: Total company ceiling for the run, helping control run size and cost. Free Apify plan is capped at 10.
• Row layout: One row per company, or one row per founder for direct CRM import.
• Enrichment: scrapeFounders (on by default), scrapeJobs, scrapeLaunches, scrapeNews. Turn them all off for the fastest, listing-only run.
• Concurrent profile requests: Parallelism when fetching company profiles (default 20).

Pagination, batch sharding, asset-version handling, retries, and deduplication are handled automatically. You do not need to configure them.

🛡️ Limits and responsible use

This Actor collects only publicly available information from the Y Combinator directory. It never signs in and never touches private, internal, or paywalled pages.

Founder email addresses are not published by Y Combinator and are not part of this Actor's output. Founder and job data are personal data — use them in line with the YC site terms and applicable law (GDPR/CCPA).

Y Combinator may rate-limit heavy traffic. The Actor paces itself, retries temporary errors, and stops at the limits you set. If one company's page can't be loaded, its row is still saved with the directory data plus an error field. Site protections are never bypassed.

🧪 Local development

bun install
bun test
bun run typecheck
apify run

Local results are stored in storage/datasets/default.