Y Combinator Scraper — Startup Directory Data 🚀

foXLabs company data: Crunchbase · Company Enrichment · Product Hunt · Bluesky

🎉 Turn the full Y Combinator directory into clean, structured startup data — no login, no API key, one row per company, with a domain on every row. Built for startup sales, VC/market research and recruiters sourcing fast-growing companies.

🔍 What is the Y Combinator Scraper — and when should you use it?

Y Combinator has funded thousands of startups, and its public directory is the single best list of them — but only as a website. Give this actor a keyword or a set of filters and it returns matching companies — website, domain, batch, status, funding stage, team size, location, industry, tags, description and whether they're hiring — as clean rows you can filter, export, or feed to a spreadsheet, a CRM or an AI agent.

Use it when you need: the whole YC portfolio as data; a targeted list (a batch, a status, an industry, companies hiring); startup sales leads with a domain to enrich; or outcome research on which startups got acquired or went public.

Use something else when: you need firmographics beyond YC's directory — then enrich the domain with Company Enrichment or pull a broader private-company view from Crunchbase.

🤖 Use with AI agents

Already on the Apify MCP server? Ask for this Actor by name: foxlabs/ycombinator-company-data.

Your agent can pay for its own runs. This Actor is pay-per-event with agentic payments, so an agent can discover it, run it and settle the bill over x402 (USDC on Base) or Skyfire — no Apify account or API token of its own. Billing is the same either way: per delivered company, never for errors.

Otherwise paste this into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP-enabled assistant:

I want the Y Combinator company directory as data using the Apify Actor
`foxlabs/ycombinator-company-data`.

Input: `query` is free-text search; filters `batch`, `status`, `industry`, `region`, `tags`
are arrays; `isHiring` and `topCompany` are booleans; `maxResults` caps rows (0 = all).
Each row has name, website, domain, batch, status, stage, teamSize, industry, tags and isHiring.

Start with:
{ "industry": ["B2B"], "status": ["Active"], "isHiring": true, "maxResults": 100 }

Ask me the segment I want, run the Actor, then summarise the companies as a table.

Things you can ask your agent for:

• "List every YC company in the Summer 2024 batch with their website and team size."
• "Give me active B2B YC startups that are hiring, with domains."
• "Which YC companies have been acquired or gone public?"

The machine-readable API, MCP config and OpenAPI definition live at apify.com/foxlabs/ycombinator-company-data.md.

📋 Overview

Everything you need to turn the YC directory into clean, structured data — firmographics, a domain join key and a hiring signal — in one actor, with no login, cookies or API key.

Why teams pick this actor:

• ✅ The whole directory — ~6,300 companies, or any filtered subset; batch-swept so nothing is lost to pagination limits.
• ⚡ Search + filters — free-text query plus batch/status/industry/region/tags/hiring filters.
• 🎯 A domain on every company — the website parsed to a bare domain, ready for CRM matching and enrichment.
• 🔴 Live, not a static dump — read fresh every run, so acquisitions, new batches and hiring flags are current.
• 💰 Pay only for results — per-company pricing, empty lookups never billed.
• 🤖 Agent-ready — MCP + x402 agentic payments.

✨ Features

• 🔍 Keyword search + facet filters — batch, status, industry, region, tags, hiring, top-company.
• 🏢 Full firmographics — name, website, domain, batch, status, stage, team size, industry/subindustry, tags, regions, location, one-liner and full description.
• 📈 Hiring signal — isHiring flags companies actively recruiting.
• 🔗 Domain join key — join YC rows onto a CRM or an enrichment actor.
• 📦 Clean export — deduplicated camelCase rows, ready for CSV/Excel/JSON.

🎬 Quick Start

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/foxlabs~ycombinator-company-data/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"industry": ["B2B"], "status": ["Active"], "isHiring": true, "maxResults": 100}'

🚀 Getting Started (3 steps)

1. Pick a segment — leave everything empty for the whole directory, or set a query / filters.
2. Set the cap — maxResults limits rows (0 = all matches).
3. Run and export — get a clean dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel.

📥 Input

{
  "query": "",
  "batch": ["Summer 2024"],
  "status": ["Active"],
  "industry": ["B2B"],
  "isHiring": true,
  "maxResults": 100
}

Field	Type	Description
query	string	Free-text search over name and description. Empty = whole directory.
batch	array	Keep only these batches (Summer 2024, Winter 2023).
status	array	Active, Acquired, Public, Inactive.
industry	array	B2B, Consumer, Healthcare, Fintech…
region	array	America / Canada, Europe…
tags	array	Artificial Intelligence, Marketplace, SaaS…
isHiring / topCompany	boolean	Only hiring / only YC "top companies".
maxResults	integer	Max companies to deliver (0 = all).

📤 Output

One row per company, saved to the dataset.

Field	Type	Description
name	string	Company name
website / domain	string	Website and parsed bare domain (the join key)
ycUrl	string	YC profile URL
batch	string	YC batch (e.g. Winter 2014)
status	string	Active / Acquired / Public / Inactive
stage	string	Funding stage
teamSize	integer	Headcount
industry / subindustry	string	Industry classification
tags / regions / industries	array	Tags, regions and industry list
allLocations	string	Location string
oneLiner / description	string	Short and full descriptions
isHiring / topCompany / nonprofit	boolean	Flags

Every row also carries source, scrapedAt and objectId.

{
  "name": "Algolia",
  "website": "https://www.algolia.com",
  "domain": "algolia.com",
  "ycUrl": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/algolia",
  "batch": "Winter 2014",
  "status": "Active",
  "stage": "Growth",
  "teamSize": 810,
  "industry": "B2B",
  "tags": ["Search", "Developer Tools", "SaaS"],
  "allLocations": "San Francisco, CA, USA",
  "oneLiner": "A developer-friendly and enterprise-grade search API.",
  "isHiring": true,
  "source": "Y Combinator"
}

💼 Use cases

1. Startup sales leads — target YC startups by industry and hiring status, with a domain to enrich. Input: industry + isHiring. Output: companies + domains. Use: feed a CRM and an email-finder.

2. VC / market research — track a batch or an industry over time, or study acquisition and IPO outcomes. Input: batch or status filters. Output: firmographics by cohort. Use: map a market and its winners.

3. Recruiter sourcing — fast-growing startups that are actively hiring. Input: isHiring + region. Output: companies with team size and location. Use: build a target company list.

🔗 Integration

JavaScript / Node.js

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('foxlabs/ycombinator-company-data').call({
  industry: ['B2B'], status: ['Active'], isHiring: true, maxResults: 100,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items[0]);

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient('YOUR_TOKEN')
run = client.actor('foxlabs/ycombinator-company-data').call(
    run_input={'industry': ['B2B'], 'status': ['Active'], 'isHiring': True, 'maxResults': 100}
)
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

Written for apify-client 3 for Python, where call() returns a run object; with version 1 or 2 it returns a dict — write run['defaultDatasetId'] there.

Automation (n8n / Zapier / Make): schedule or webhook → HTTP request to the actor API with your filters → handle the JSON dataset → push to a sheet, CRM or dashboard.

📊 Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.003 per delivered company. Empty lookups are never billed. The whole directory or any slice scales linearly; you pay for the companies you actually get. View current pricing.

❓ FAQ

Do I need a Y Combinator API key? No. There is no official YC API; this reads the public company directory directly, with no key or login.

How many companies are in the directory? Around 6,300 and growing with every batch. The actor returns all of them (or any filtered subset) — it sweeps batch by batch so nothing is lost to pagination limits.

Can I filter by batch or status? Yes — by batch, status, industry, region or tags, plus a free-text query and hiring/top-company flags.

Does it include each company's website? Yes — every company carries its website and a parsed domain, the join key for CRM matching and enrichment.

How current is the data? Every run reads the live directory, so acquisitions, new companies and hiring flags update automatically.

Can I export to CSV / Excel / JSON? Yes — directly from the Apify dataset.

🐛 Troubleshooting

• Fewer companies than expected — a filter is narrowing the set, or maxResults is capping it; clear filters or raise the cap (0 = all).
• A field is empty — YC does not fill every field for every company; empty values are returned as absent, never fabricated.
• No results — the query or filter combination matched nothing; broaden it.

⚠️ Trademark

Independent, third-party tool. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Y Combinator Management, LLC. "Y Combinator" and related marks belong to their owners and are used here for identification only.

⚖️ Is it legal to scrape this data?

This actor reads only the publicly published company directory — company data, not private or personal user data. Your results can still contain personal data (e.g. a founder name in a description); personal data is protected by the GDPR and similar laws, so only process it with a legitimate basis. See Apify's blog post on the legality of web scraping.

🤝 Support & contact

• 🌐 Website: data.foxlabs.com.tr
• 📧 Email: info@foxlabs.com.tr
• 🐛 Issues: open a ticket in the Actor's Issues tab
• 🧰 More clean B2B data actors: Fox Labs on Apify

Changelog

0.1.0 — 2026-10-12

• Initial release: full YC directory export with search and batch/status/industry/region/tag/hiring filters; runtime credential extraction; batch-sweep for complete coverage past the 1000-hit pagination cap; a parsed domain on every company.