Y Combinator Scraper — Companies, Founders, Jobs & All Data Points

Scrape the entire Y Combinator ecosystem from one Apify Actor. 5,700+ companies (W05 to the latest cohort), 8,000+ founders with social URLs, 3,000+ open jobs with salary, equity, visa, and skills. Plus news mentions, YC Launch posts, app/demo-day videos, and the YC application Q&A when public.

Paste any YC URL — /companies?...filters, /companies/{slug}, /companies/{slug}/jobs/{slug}, /jobs?role=... — or pick from the filter UI. The actor auto-routes each URL to the right extractor.

What you get

Surface	Data points
Company	id, slug, name, batch (W26/S26/F25/etc.), status, one-liner, long description, website, team size, year founded, industry + sub-industry, regions, HQ city/country, location string, tags, top-company flag, hiring flag, nonprofit flag, launched-at date, logo URLs, LinkedIn / Twitter / Facebook / Crunchbase / GitHub URLs, app video URL, demo-day video URL, app answers (when public), primary YC partner
Founder	userId, full name, title, bio, LinkedIn URL, Twitter URL, avatar, hasEmail flag, isActive flag
Open Job (per company)	id, title, jobUrl, applyUrl, location, type (full-time/part-time/contract/intern), role + roleSpecificType + prettyRole, salaryRange, equityRange, visa sponsorship, skills[], minExperience, createdAt, lastActive
Job (jobs mode)	All open-job fields plus full long-form description + hiring manager when scrapeJobDescriptions is on
News & Launch posts	News title + URL + date; YC Launch post title + tagline + permalink
Run summary	Counts, errors, duration, mode

Why this actor

• One actor, every surface. No need to chain three scrapers — companies, founders, jobs, news come back in one record per company.
• MCP-native. Single auto-routing input, structured agent-friendly output, predictable per-event pricing. Drop into Claude / GPT / Apify MCP and it answers questions like "find YC fintech startups in Europe hiring engineers" in one tool call.
• Reliable. Uses YC's public Algolia index for company discovery (no proxy needed, no rate limit) + residential-proxy HTML enrichment with session pool + circuit-breaker. Target: 95%+ run success rate.
• Premium-tier completeness, fair price. $0.005 per record (between the cheap $0.001/1K actors that drop fields and the premium leader at $0.01–0.15). Founders and jobs are billed separately ($0.001 each) so you only pay for what you turn on.

Pricing

Event	Price
Actor start	$0.00005 (per GB RAM)
Result (one company OR one job)	$0.005
Enrichment (one founder OR one embedded job per company)	$0.001

Typical run cost: 100 companies + founders enrichment + 3 founders avg/company ≈ 100 × $0.005 + 300 × $0.001 = $0.80.

Pay-Per-Usage is also enabled for power users running multi-million-record jobs — compute units + proxy passthrough are billed directly by Apify.

Quick start

Get the Spring 2026 batch with founders

{
  "mode": "companies",
  "batches": ["Spring 2026"],
  "scrapeFounders": true,
  "maxResults": 100
}

Get all hiring B2B startups in Europe

{
  "mode": "companies",
  "industries": ["B2B"],
  "regions": ["Europe", "United Kingdom"],
  "isHiring": true,
  "scrapeFounders": true,
  "scrapeOpenJobs": true,
  "maxResults": 200
}

Get every open software-engineer job in San Francisco

{
  "mode": "jobs",
  "jobRole": "eng",
  "jobLocation": "san-francisco",
  "scrapeJobDescriptions": true,
  "maxResults": 500
}

Paste any YC URL

{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Spring%202026&industry=Fintech",
    "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/stripe",
    "https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs?role=design"
  ],
  "scrapeFounders": true
}

Daily incremental "what's new" run

{
  "mode": "jobs",
  "jobRole": "eng",
  "monitoringMode": true,
  "maxResults": 0
}

The actor persists every emitted job id in the STATE key-value collection. On the next scheduled run, only IDs not yet seen are emitted. Perfect for cron-driven email alerts and pipelines.

Code examples

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("khadinakbar/y-combinator-scraper").call(run_input={
    "mode": "companies",
    "batches": ["Spring 2026", "Winter 2026"],
    "industries": ["B2B"],
    "scrapeFounders": True,
    "maxResults": 50,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["name"], item["batch"], len(item.get("founders", [])))

Node.js

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('khadinakbar/y-combinator-scraper').call({
  mode: 'companies',
  batches: ['Spring 2026'],
  scrapeFounders: true,
  scrapeOpenJobs: true,
  maxResults: 50,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
for (const item of items) {
  console.log(item.name, item.founders?.length, item.openJobs?.length);
}

MCP (Claude / Cursor / Continue)

Use the apify--y-combinator-scraper tool name through Apify MCP at https://mcp.apify.com.

Find me 20 YC fintech startups in Europe that are currently hiring,
and include each founder's LinkedIn URL.

The agent calls apify--y-combinator-scraper with industries=["Fintech"], regions=["Europe"], isHiring=true, scrapeFounders=true, maxResults=20.

Filters reference

Companies mode

Filter	Type	Example
query	string	"developer tools", "AI agents"
batches	array	["Spring 2026", "Winter 2026"]
industries	array	["B2B", "Fintech"]
regions	array	["Europe", "Remote"]
topCompany	boolean	true = curated Top Companies only
isHiring	boolean	true = currently hiring only
nonprofit	boolean	true = YC nonprofits only
minTeamSize / maxTeamSize	integer	10 / 50

Jobs mode

Filter	Type	Example
query	string	"react", "machine learning"
jobRole	enum	eng, design, product, ops, marketing, sales, support, recruiting-hr, science
jobLocation	string	san-francisco, new-york, london, remote, india

Enrichment toggles

Toggle	When	Cost
scrapeFounders	Companies mode	$0.001 per founder added
scrapeOpenJobs	Companies mode	$0.001 per job added
scrapeNewsAndLaunches	Companies mode	free (same HTTP fetch)
scrapeJobDescriptions	Jobs mode	free (covered by base $0.005/job)

Output shape

Each company record looks like:

{
  "itemType": "company",
  "id": 271,
  "slug": "airbnb",
  "name": "Airbnb",
  "batch": "W09",
  "batchName": "Winter 2009",
  "status": "Public",
  "oneLiner": "Book accommodations around the world.",
  "website": "http://airbnb.com",
  "teamSize": 6132,
  "industries": ["Consumer"],
  "regions": ["United States of America"],
  "tags": ["Marketplace", "Travel"],
  "topCompany": true,
  "isHiring": false,
  "linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/airbnb/",
  "twitterUrl": "https://twitter.com/airbnb",
  "githubUrl": "https://github.com/airbnb",
  "logoUrl": "https://...",
  "ycUrl": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/airbnb",
  "primaryPartner": "Garry Tan",
  "founders": [
    {
      "fullName": "Brian Chesky",
      "title": "Founder/CEO",
      "linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianchesky/",
      "twitterUrl": "https://twitter.com/bchesky",
      "founderBio": "...",
      "hasEmail": true,
      "isActive": true
    }
  ]
}

Each job record looks like:

{
  "itemType": "job",
  "id": 47049,
  "title": "Frontend Engineer, Identity",
  "jobUrl": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/stripe/jobs/jdBhPmD-frontend-engineer-identity",
  "applyUrl": "https://...workatastartup.com/application?...",
  "location": "United States / Remote",
  "jobType": "Full-time",
  "prettyRole": "Engineering",
  "roleSpecificType": "Frontend",
  "salaryRange": "",
  "equityRange": "",
  "visa": "Will sponsor",
  "skills": ["JavaScript"],
  "minExperience": "6+ years",
  "companyName": "Stripe",
  "companyBatch": "S09",
  "companyOneLiner": "Economic infrastructure for the internet.",
  "createdAt": "over 4 years",
  "lastActive": null
}

Reliability notes

• Companies discovery uses YC's public Algolia index (YCCompany_production). No proxy, no rate limit. We re-acquire the dynamic API key from ycombinator.com/companies once at run start.
• HTML enrichment (/companies/{slug}, /jobs, /jobs/{slug}) uses Apify residential proxy by default, with Crawlee session pool (max 20 sessions, max 30 uses each, retire on error score 3+).
• Retries: 5 per request with exponential backoff and jitter. Sessions retire on 403/429.
• Graceful failure: when a target URL fails after retries, the URL + reason is recorded in the run summary errors[] array and the run continues. Partial success is success.

Related actors

Pair this with:

• khadinakbar/linkedin-profile-email-scraper — enrich every YC founder's LinkedIn with a verified email.
• khadinakbar/linkedin-jobs-scraper — broader job market signal beyond the YC ecosystem.
• khadinakbar/b2b-lead-finder-enrichment — find decision makers at any of the scraped YC companies.

FAQ

Q: Is this legal? Y Combinator publishes the entire company directory + jobs board for public, unauthenticated viewing. This actor reads only those public pages and the public Algolia index that YC's own frontend uses. We do not log in, do not bypass any auth wall, and do not access Work At A Startup's authenticated areas.

Q: How fresh is the data? Every run hits YC live — there's no cached snapshot. Algolia is updated in near real-time by YC's content team. Company HTML and jobs pages are server-rendered fresh.

Q: Why are some applyUrl values pointing to account.ycombinator.com/authenticate? YC routes apply links through their authentication system on the way to Work At A Startup. That's their design — the URL is correct, and a human user who clicks it from a browser will be prompted to sign in once, then forwarded to the actual job application form.

Q: Why is salaryRange empty on some jobs? Many YC startups don't publish salary bands on their YC job posting. That's a YC company choice, not a scraper limitation. When present, it's returned verbatim ("$180K - $230K").

Legal disclaimer

This actor scrapes only publicly accessible pages on ycombinator.com. By using this actor you agree to:

• Comply with Y Combinator's Terms of Service.
• Use the data for legitimate purposes (research, hiring, BD, journalism).
• Respect the personal data of founders (do not spam, comply with GDPR/CCPA, honor opt-outs).
• The actor author is not responsible for misuse.