Y Combinator Companies Scraper: Startups, Founders, Batches

This Actor exports companies from the public Y Combinator startup directory (ycombinator.com/companies). Filter by batch, industry, region, status, team size, hiring flag or search text, and get one row per company with name, website, one-liner, description, batch, tags, team size and logo. Turn on Include founders to add each founder's name, title, LinkedIn and X links plus the company's own social links. No login, cookie or API key needed.

• Batch codes work. Type W25, S24, F24 or P25 (Spring 2025), full names like Summer 2024, or a whole year like 2024.
• The whole directory is reachable. The directory search only returns 1,000 companies per query. The Actor splits large searches by batch behind the scenes, so a run with no filters can read all of the roughly 6,400 companies.
• Leads and research. Filter for active companies that are hiring, have 2 to 10 people and sit in Fintech, then export founders with LinkedIn links.
• Safe to start empty. With no input at all it returns the newest 100 companies instead of failing.

What data you get

Field	What it holds
name, slug, url, website	The company, its YC page and its own site
oneLiner, description	Tagline and long description
batch, batchCode	For example Winter 2025 and W25
status, stage	Active, Acquired, Public or Inactive, and the stage YC shows
industry, subindustry, industries, tags	YC's industry labels and the tags the company chose
regions, location	Regions and countries YC files it under, and the location text
teamSize, isHiring, isTopCompany, isNonprofit	Size and flags
launchedAt, formerNames, logoUrl	When it joined the directory, earlier names, logo image
founders	Name, title, linkedin, twitter, bio and isActive for each founder (with Include founders)
yearFounded, city, country, openJobsCount	From the company page (with Include founders)
linkedinUrl, twitterUrl, facebookUrl, crunchbaseUrl, githubUrl	The company's social links, when it lists them (with Include founders)

How to use it

1. Optionally add search text, batches, industries, regions, status or a team size range. Leave everything empty for the full directory.
2. Set Max companies.
3. Optional: turn on Only companies that are hiring, Only top companies or Include founders and social links.
4. Run it and export to JSON, CSV or Excel, or call it from the API, Make, Zapier, n8n or an AI agent through the Apify MCP server.

Industries and regions are matched without caring about case, so fintech and Fintech are the same. A name that does not exist in the directory is ignored with a warning in the log and in the run's status message. If none of your names exist, the run finishes with no items.

Example input

{
  "batches": ["S24", "W25"],
  "industries": ["Fintech"],
  "includeFounders": true,
  "maxItems": 25
}

Example output (one company, description and bios shortened)

{
  "id": 30363,
  "name": "BlindPay",
  "slug": "blindpay",
  "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/blindpay",
  "website": "https://blindpay.com/",
  "oneLiner": "Stablecoin API for global payments",
  "description": "BlindPay is a stablecoin API that enables companies to send and receive money worldwide using fiat money, stablecoins and multiple blockchains. ...",
  "batch": "Winter 2025",
  "batchCode": "W25",
  "status": "Active",
  "stage": "Early",
  "industry": "Fintech",
  "subindustry": "Fintech -> Payments",
  "industries": ["Fintech", "Payments"],
  "tags": ["Developer Tools", "Fintech", "Crypto / Web3", "Payments", "API"],
  "regions": ["United States of America", "America / Canada"],
  "location": "San Francisco, CA, USA",
  "teamSize": 9,
  "isHiring": false,
  "isTopCompany": false,
  "isNonprofit": false,
  "launchedAt": "2025-01-21T03:28:14.000Z",
  "formerNames": [],
  "logoUrl": "https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/f1817a0c9b9ff2db524e7cb0712e6867cdfcb2f0.png",
  "yearFounded": 2024,
  "city": "San Francisco",
  "country": "US",
  "linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/blindpay",
  "twitterUrl": "https://x.com/blindpay",
  "facebookUrl": null,
  "crunchbaseUrl": null,
  "githubUrl": null,
  "openJobsCount": 0,
  "founders": [
    {
      "name": "Bernardo Simonassi",
      "title": "Founder/CEO",
      "linkedin": "https://linkedin.com/in/bernardosm",
      "twitter": "https://x.com/bebedaselva",
      "bio": "Co-Founder & CEO @ BlindPay. Has been shaping the stablecoin payments industry for the past 3 years ...",
      "isActive": true
    },
    {
      "name": "Joao Borges",
      "title": "Founder",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/joaoborgesjr/",
      "twitter": "https://x.com/joaocsb",
      "bio": "Co-Founder @ BlindPay",
      "isActive": true
    }
  ],
  "detailsFetched": true,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-11-02T02:07:58.001Z"
}

How much does it cost?

You pay per company saved: $0.0015 per company, plus $0.0005 once per run. Founders and social links are included at no extra cost. A search that matches nothing saves no companies, so it costs only the start fee.

1,000 companies cost about $1.50. The whole directory (about 6,400 companies) costs about $9.60. Apify's free plan credit of $5 a month covers about 3,300 companies.

Use cases

• Lead lists: active, hiring YC companies in one industry, with founder names and LinkedIn links for outreach.
• Investor and market research: every company in a batch or industry, with team size, status and tags, in one spreadsheet.
• Tracking batches: run it after each Demo Day with the new batch code to collect the new cohort.
• Datasets for AI and analysis: one-liners, descriptions and tags for classification, clustering or retrieval.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? From the public YC startup directory. The Actor reads the search settings that the directory page itself publishes each time it starts, so it keeps working when YC rotates its search key. No account is used.

Does it return funding amounts or emails? No. The directory does not publish funding rounds, and the Actor does not look up or guess emails. You get what YC shows: founders, titles and the LinkedIn and X links they list.

How fresh is the data? It is read live on every run, so it matches what the directory shows at that moment.

Why are some founder or social fields empty? Companies fill those in themselves. When a link is not listed, the field is null. If a company page cannot be read, founders is null, detailsFetched is false and the page is listed in the SUMMARY record of the key-value store. The company is still saved and counted.

How fast is it? About 6,400 companies without founders took roughly 75 seconds on 256 MB in a test run. With Include founders the Actor opens one page per company and manages about 6 companies per second, so a few hundred take under a minute.

Which batches come first? When more than 1,000 companies match, the Actor goes through batches from newest to oldest, so a low Max companies gives you the latest ones. Smaller searches keep the directory's own order.

Is this legal? It only reads what YC publishes openly. You are responsible for how you use the data, especially personal data about founders, under laws like GDPR.

Other Actors by this developer

• Hacker News Scraper: stories, comments and Show HN posts, plus the front page.
• Website Tech Stack Detector: find out which tools a company's website runs on.
• Domain Profile, WHOIS and DNS: registration and DNS details for the websites in your list.
• Dataset Merge and Dedupe: combine and clean exports from several runs.
• Bluesky Scraper: posts and profiles from Bluesky.