# Y Combinator Scraper (`michael.g/y-combinator-scraper`) Actor Extract startup leads, founder emails, LinkedIn profiles, hiring data, and more from YC companies and founders. Export scraped data, schedule via API, and integrate with other tools or AI workflows. - **URL**: https://apify.com/michael.g/y-combinator-scraper.md - **Developed by:** [Michael G](https://apify.com/michael.g) (community) - **Categories:** Lead generation, Jobs, AI - **Stats:** 1,629 total users, 38 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 177 bookmarks - **User rating**: 5.00 out of 5 stars ## Pricing from $10.00 / 1,000 results This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events. Since this Actor supports Apify Store discounts, the price gets lower the higher subscription plan you have. Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event ## What's an Apify Actor? An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes. In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours, and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store. In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server. Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md. ## How to integrate an Actor? If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects. You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready. Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run. For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below. Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`). # README ### What does Y Combinator Scraper do? Y Combinator Scraper allows you to extract data about companies and founders from the [Y Combinator directory](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/): company name, description, batch, industry, subindustry, status, location, open jobs, website, founder name, founder emails, founder LinkedIn, and more. ### About Y Combinator Y Combinator is the leading startup accelerator for entrepreneurs. Since 2005, YC has invested in over 5,500 companies that have a combined valuation of over $600B, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Reddit, Instacart, DoorDash, Apollo, and Coinbase. Today, YC has built the most powerful startup community in the world alongside the products and programs to support founders for the life of their company. Because of this, the YC directory is one of the best public sources for discovering **high-quality startups, founders, and startup hiring data**. ### Company data fields | Field Name | Type | Description | |-----------------------|----------------|----------------------------------------------| | Company Image | String (URL) | Company image URL | | Company ID | Int | Company id provided by YC | | Company Name | String | Company name | | Url | String (URL) | Company profile URL on Y Combinator | | Short Description | String | One-line company description | | Long Description | String | Detailed company description | | Batch | String | Batch name provided by YC | | Industry | String | Primary industry | | Sub-Industry | String | Sub-industry | | Stage | String | Company growth stage | | Status | String | Company status | | Tags | List | Additional industry tags | | Company Location | String | Company location | | Regions | List | Company operating regions | | Year Founded | String | Year the company was founded | | Team Size | String | Number of employees | | Primary Partner | String | Mentor for a company | | Top Company | Boolean | YC top company flag | | Nonprofit | Boolean | Nonprofit status | | Website | String (URL) | Company website | | Company LinkedIn | String (URL) | Company LinkedIn profile URL | | Company X | String (URL) | Company X (Twitter) profile URL | | Company Facebook | String (URL) | Company Facebook profile URL | | Company Crunchbase | String (URL) | Company Crunchbase profile URL | | Company GitHub | String (URL) | Company GitHub profile URL | | Is Hiring | Boolean | Hiring status (true/false) | | Number of Open Jobs | Int | Count of open job positions | ### Open Jobs data fields | Field Name | Type | Description | |-----------------------|----------------|----------------------------------------------| | ID | Int | Job posting id provided by YC | | Title | String | Job position title | | Description URL | String (URL) | Detailed job posting URL | | Description | String | Job requirements and details | | Location | String | Required job location | | Remote | Boolean | Remote work availability (true/false) | | Type | String | Job type | | Role | String | Job role/department | | Salary | String | Salary range/compensation | | Equity | String | Equity compensation range | | Skills | List | Required skills | | Years Experience | String | Required experience level | | Visa | String | Visa requirements | ### Founders data fields | Field Name | Type | Description | |-----------------------|-----------------|----------------------------------------------| | ID | Int | Founder id provided by YC | | Name | String | Founder name | | Title | String | Founder title/role | | Bio | String | Founder biography | | Email Available | Boolean | Founder email availability (true/false) | | Email | String | Founder email address | | Email Status | String | Founder email status (verified/risky) | | LinkedIn | String (URL) | Founder LinkedIn URL | | X | String (URL) | Founder X (Twitter) URL | ### Why scrape Y Combinator? - **Lead generation:** identifying startups for potential collaboration, partnerships, sales, or investment. - **Founder outreach:** collecting founder emails and LinkedIn profiles when available. - **Market research:** analyzing trends and popular niches in the startup ecosystem. - **Studying the startup landscape:** understanding successful approaches, categories, and business models. - **Recruiting:** discovering YC startups that are actively hiring across engineering and product roles. - **Finding inspiration:** exploring ideas and innovations that could influence your own project. ### Example Input Companies search URL: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=X25 ![Input Example](https://i.imghippo.com/files/wwnS1286vE.png) And here's the same, just in JSON. ```json { "scrape_all_companies": false, "scrape_founders": true, "scrape_open_jobs": true, "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=X25" } ``` ### Output sample The results will be wrapped into a dataset which you can find in the Storage tab. Note that the output is organized in a table for viewing convenience. Here's an example of some of the output from the previous companies search URL: ![Output Sample](https://i.imghippo.com/files/ECk6056lM.png) By clicking on the green Export button, you can download the dataset in XML, CSV, Excel, HTML, or JSON. See an example of a JSON file: ```json { "company_image": "https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/fae29a98d132c4b435b336dbb5d6cf4a1aaf5de7.png", "company_id": 30545, "company_name": "StarSling", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/starsling", "short_description": "Self-Driving CI", "long_description": "StarSling is building an AI-native DevOps platform for developers that ship, starting with CI. StarSling Runners are fast GitHub Actions runners with AI agents that continuously improve your build speeds by more than 80%.", "batch": "Spring 2025", "industry": "B2B", "subindustry": "Engineering, Product And Design", "stage": "Early", "status": "Active", "tags": [ "Artificial Intelligence", "Developer Tools", "B2B", "Devops", "AI" ], "company_location": "San Francisco", "year_founded": "2025", "team_size": "2", "primary_partner": "Tom Blomfield", "top_company": false, "nonprofit": false, "website": "https://www.starsling.dev/", "company_linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/starslingdev", "company_x": "https://x.com/starslingdev", "company_facebook": null, "company_crunchbase": null, "company_github": "https://github.com/starslingdev", "founders": [ { "id": 7866, "name": "Yonas Beshawred", "title": "Co-founder & CEO", "bio": "Co-founder & CEO @ StarSling 💫 Previously Founder & CEO of StackShare, a developer community that had 1.5M+ devs and an enterprise SaaS offering ~$1M ARR, then sold to FOSSA.", "emails": { "available": true, "email": "yonas@starsling.dev", "status": "verified" }, "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/yonas-beshawred/", "x": "https://x.com/yonasbe" }, { "id": 751609, "name": "Daniel Worku", "title": "Co-founder & CTO", "bio": "Co-founder & CTO @ StarSling 💫 Built Netflix’s Internal Developer Portal (IDP) for their 3K+ engineers & managers and scaled it to become the highest DAU internal tool for devs. Eng on Facebook’s AI Camera team and helped build the mobile computer vision lib that currently powers camera effects for 100M+ DAUs across IG, FB, and WhatsApp.", "emails": { "available": true, "email": "daniel@starsling.dev", "status": "verified" }, "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/worku", "x": "https://x.com/dbworku" } ], "is_hiring": true, "number_of_open_jobs": 2, "open_jobs": [ { "id": 78543, "title": "Software Engineer (Full-Stack)", "description_url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/starsling/jobs/YGCndbU-software-engineer-full-stack", "description": "We’re looking for a Software Engineer (Full-Stack) to join our team in the San Francisco Bay Area. We're focused on solving a big problem: how to make all the annoying tasks outside of your code editor fully agentic; everything from deployment to performance, incidents, and bugs.\n\nYou'll be working directly with me ([Daniel](https://www.linkedin.com/in/worku/)). Before StarSling, I was the Engineering Manager at Netflix working on the most used internal tool for their 3K+ engineers and tens of thousands of microservices — an internal developer portal called Netflix Console. Earlier in my career I was an engineer on Facebook’s AI Camera team and helped build the mobile computer vision library that currently powers camera effects for 100M+ DAUs across IG, FB, and WhatsApp. I’m obsessed with helping every engineer be more productive.\n\nYou’ll also be working directly with my co-founder [Yonas](https://www.linkedin.com/in/yonas-beshawred/). Before StarSling, Yonas was the Founder & CEO of StackShare, a developer community used by over 40 million developers. He raised $12M as a first-time founder and did founder sales to get them to just under $1M ARR with their enterprise product before selling the company last year. He’s obsessed with creating product experiences that developers love and building community.\n\n### 💻 What You’ll Own\n\n* **Event-driven backend:** Architect our Node.js / Next.js / TypeScript and Supabase stack. Design schemas, event flows and ingest dev tools webhooks to power a real-time personalized engineering portal.\n* **LLM Agentic Workflows:** Build a **_system of agents_** — MCP, tool use, memory, retry logic, context updates, feedback mechanisms.\n* **Agent Experience (AX):** Create intuitive product interfaces for human-agent interactions. Explore and iterate with engineers to find the right interaction paradigm to productivity work with a digital co-pilot.\n* **System Design & Technical Strategy:** Work directly with me to determine the best technical path that balances moving fast and scaling to many customers using different dev tools. Determine how we integrate and support the open-source community.\n\n### ✅ This IS for you if\n\n* **You’re a full-stack 0-to-1 builder** who has shipped to production. Especially in rapidly shipping NextJS apps and working with event-based systems in a serverless architecture.\n* **You have a genuine curiosity about agentic product experiences** and are excited about understanding the impact of AI on engineering users.\n* **You’re a previous founder or founding engineer.** You have built something from scratch that people use or pay for.\n* **You’re unusually obsessed with hard problems.** Your current skills or even what you've done before is less important than your ability to go all-in and accomplish anything that you set your mind to.\n* **You’re comfortable with ambiguity** and adapting to dynamic priorities. You need to have good judgement to know when to let little fires burn and when to immediately jump in.\n* **You have excellent communication and candor.** You’ll be communicating directly with engineers and collaborating with us on key decisions.\n* **You care about helping swamped engineers** fight through the [schlep](https://paulgraham.com/schlep.html) of software development. If that's not an exciting mission for you, it will be hard to stay motivated through the inevitable highs and lows.\n* **You have grit and perseverance.** You should accustomed to picking between hard options and pushing through it.\n* **You can work in the US long-term**. You are a US citizen or green card holder that can start quickly and work with StarSling over many years.\n\n### ❌ This IS NOT for you if\n\n* **You’re not based in The Bay Area** (we’ll be a team of four if you join so we’ll be sitting next to each other everyday)\n* **You’re not willing to work six days per week** (we take Sundays off)\n* **You’re not excited about using codegen tools** like Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, etc.\n* **You’re not comfortable deleting** 80%-90% of the code that you write.\n* **You’re not comfortable with ambiguity** and rapid context-switching.\n* **You don’t like candor**- receiving and giving direct, honest feedback.\n* **You need a well defined structure** or career ladder.\n\n### 🌍 The Opportunity\n\n* **Work alongside two experienced co-founders** - one who built and sold a dev tools startup and one who led the engineering effort to create the same product we’re creating at scale\n* **Get experience across the startup stack** - you’ll be doing customer support, bug squashing, user interviews, events, and everything else along with writing code\n* **Be one of the first employees of the next dev tools category leader** - we’re not just building a dev tool, we’re building an engineering platform that every company in Silicon Valley will be using and paying for", "location": "San Francisco, CA, US / San Mateo, CA, US / Palo Alto, CA, US / Menlo Park, CA, US / Redwood City, CA, US", "remote": false, "type": "Full-time", "role": "Engineering, Full stack", "salary": "$150K - $190K", "equity": "2.00% - 3.00%", "skills": [ "Next.js", "TypeScript", "Distributed Systems" ], "years_experience": "3+ years", "visa": "US citizen/visa only" }, { "id": 77003, "title": "Founding Software Engineer (Full-Stack)", "description_url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/starsling/jobs/ZvHKf88-founding-software-engineer-full-stack", "description": "We’re looking for a Founding Software Engineer (Full-Stack) to join our team in the San Francisco Bay Area. We're focused on solving a big problem: how to make all the annoying tasks outside of your code editor fully agentic; everything from deployment to performance, incidents, and bugs.\n\nYou'll be working directly with me ([Daniel](https://www.linkedin.com/in/worku/)). Before StarSling, I was the Engineering Manager at Netflix working on the most used internal tool for their 3K+ engineers and tens of thousands of microservices — an internal developer portal called Netflix Console. Earlier in my career I was an engineer on Facebook’s AI Camera team and helped build the mobile computer vision library that currently powers camera effects for 100M+ DAUs across IG, FB, and WhatsApp. I’m obsessed with helping every engineer be more productive.\n\nYou’ll also be working directly with my co-founder [Yonas](https://www.linkedin.com/in/yonas-beshawred/). Before StarSling, Yonas was the Founder & CEO of StackShare, a developer community used by over 40 million developers. He raised $12M as a first-time founder and did founder sales to get them to just under $1M ARR with their enterprise product before selling the company last year. He’s obsessed with creating product experiences that developers love and building community.\n\n### 💻 What You’ll Own\n\n* **Event-driven backend:** Architect our Node.js / Next.js / TypeScript and Supabase stack. Design schemas, event flows and ingest dev tools webhooks to power a real-time personalized engineering portal.\n* **LLM Agentic Workflows:** Build a **_system of agents_** — MCP, tool use, memory, retry logic, context updates, feedback mechanisms.\n* **Agent Experience (AX):** Create intuitive product interfaces for human-agent interactions. Explore and iterate with engineers to find the right interaction paradigm to productivity work with a digital co-pilot.\n* **System Design & Technical Strategy:** Work directly with me to determine the best technical path that balances moving fast and scaling to many customers using different dev tools. Determine how we integrate and support the open-source community.\n\n### ✅ This IS for you if\n\n* **You’re a full-stack 0-to-1 builder** who has shipped to production. Especially in rapidly shipping NextJS apps and working with event-based systems in a serverless architecture.\n* **You have a genuine curiosity about agentic product experiences** and are excited about understanding the impact of AI on engineering users.\n* **You’re a previous founder or founding engineer.** You have built something from scratch that people use or pay for.\n* **You’re unusually obsessed with hard problems.** Your current skills or even what you've done before is less important than your ability to go all-in and accomplish anything that you set your mind to.\n* **You’re comfortable with ambiguity** and adapting to dynamic priorities. You need to have good judgement to know when to let little fires burn and when to immediately jump in.\n* **You have excellent communication and candor.** You’ll be communicating directly with engineers and collaborating with us on key decisions.\n* **You care about helping swamped engineers** fight through the [schlep](https://paulgraham.com/schlep.html) of software development. If that's not an exciting mission for you, it will be hard to stay motivated through the inevitable highs and lows.\n* **You have grit and perseverance.** You should accustomed to picking between hard options and pushing through it.\n* **You can work in the US long-term**. You are a US citizen or green card holder that can start quickly and work with StarSling over many years.\n\n### ❌ This IS NOT for you if\n\n* **You’re not based in The Bay Area** (we’ll be a team of four if you join so we’ll be sitting next to each other everyday)\n* **You’re not willing to work six days per week** (we take Sundays off)\n* **You’re not excited about using codegen tools** like Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, etc.\n* **You’re not comfortable deleting** 80%-90% of the code that you write.\n* **You’re not comfortable with ambiguity** and rapid context-switching.\n* **You don’t like candor**- receiving and giving direct, honest feedback.\n* **You need a well defined structure** or career ladder.\n\n### 🌍 The Opportunity\n\n* **Work alongside two experienced co-founders** - one who built and sold a dev tools startup and one who led the engineering effort to create the same product we’re creating at scale\n* **Get experience across the startup stack** - you’ll be doing customer support, bug squashing, user interviews, events, and everything else along with writing code\n* **Be the first employee of the next dev tools category leader** - we’re not just building a dev tool, we’re building an engineering platform that every company in Silicon Valley will be using and paying for", "location": "San Francisco, CA, US / San Mateo, CA, US / Palo Alto, CA, US / Menlo Park, CA, US / Redwood City, CA, US", "remote": false, "type": "Full-time", "role": "Engineering, Full stack", "salary": "$150K - $190K", "equity": "2.00% - 3.00%", "skills": [ "Next.js", "TypeScript", "Distributed Systems" ], "years_experience": "3+ years", "visa": "US citizen/visa only" } ] } ``` ### How do I use Y Combinator Scraper? The Y Combinator Scraper is designed to help you easily extract contact details from the web, even if you have no prior experience. Follow these steps to scrape data on Y Combinator companies and their founders: 1. **Enter Search URL:** Copy and paste the Y Combinator directory search URL directly into the scraper's input field. 2. **Run the Scraper:** Click "Start" and wait for the data extraction to complete. 3. Export your data in Excel, CSV, JSON, HTML, or via API. After selecting the necessary filters, the URL address may not update immediately from time to time. Therefore, please double-check it before pasting it into the scraper. Additionally, you can change the "Sort by" option as shown in the screenshot to ensure that the URL address updates promptly based on the filters you have selected. ![Manual Example](https://i.imghippo.com/files/zvR4278itg.png) ### Features - **Scrape Founders:** Enable this option to gather detailed information about all founders from each company. - **Scrape Open Jobs:** Set this feature to true if you want to get information about open job positions at the companies. - **Scrape All Companies:** Set this feature to true if you want to get information about all companies (over 5,500) from all batches. ### How much does Y Combinator Scraper scraping cost? This scraper uses the Pay-per-result pricing model, so your costs can be easily calculated: it will cost you **$15 to scrape 1,000 search results**, which is $0.015 per item. Apify provides you with $5 in free usage credits every month on the [Apify Free plan](https://apify.com/pricing), allowing you to **scrape over 30 search results** from the Y Combinator directory for free using those credits. For regular data extraction, consider upgrading to the [$29/month Starter plan](https://apify.com/pricing), which can **get you over 1,700 search results every month.** ### Integrations and Y Combinator Scraper Y Combinator Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. You can integrate with Make, n8n, Zapier, Apollo, Clay, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Sheets, Google Drive, and [more](https://docs.apify.com/platform/integrations). ### Your feedback We're always working on improving the performance of our Actors. If you've got any technical feedback for Y Combinator Scraper or simply found a bug, please create an issue on the actor's [Issues tab](https://console.apify.com/actors/wHFYMA8uTMrmdhjfK/issues) in Apify Console. # Changelog This Actor's version history is a separate document: https://apify.com/michael.g/y-combinator-scraper/changelog.md # Actor input Schema ## `url` (type: `string`): Companies search URL. Go to the [Y Combinator directory](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/), search using the required filters, and once you are done, copy the full URL from the address bar and paste it here. ## `scrape_founders` (type: `boolean`): If true, the actor will scrape information about all company founders. ## `scrape_open_jobs` (type: `boolean`): Set to true if you want to get information about open jobs. ## `max_companies` (type: `integer`): Maximum number of results to return. Leave empty for no limit. ## `scrape_all_companies` (type: `boolean`): Set to true to scrape all companies (over 5,500) from all batches. When true, the Companies search URL and Maximum Companies parameters will be ignored. ## Actor input object example ```json { "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026", "scrape_founders": true, "scrape_open_jobs": false, "scrape_all_companies": false } ``` # Actor output Schema ## `dataset` (type: `string`): No description # API You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup. ## JavaScript example ```javascript import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client'; // Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token // Replace the '' with your token const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '', }); // Prepare Actor input const input = { "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026", "scrape_founders": true, "scrape_open_jobs": false, "scrape_all_companies": false }; // Run the Actor and wait for it to finish const run = await client.actor("michael.g/y-combinator-scraper").call(input); // Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any) console.log('Results from dataset'); console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`); const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems(); items.forEach((item) => { console.dir(item); }); // 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs ``` ## Python example ```python from apify_client import ApifyClient # Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token # Replace '' with your token. client = ApifyClient("") # Prepare the Actor input run_input = { "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026", "scrape_founders": True, "scrape_open_jobs": False, "scrape_all_companies": False, } # Run the Actor and wait for it to finish run = client.actor("michael.g/y-combinator-scraper").call(run_input=run_input) # Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any) print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}") for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items(): print(item) # 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start ``` ## CLI example ```bash echo '{ "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026", "scrape_founders": true, "scrape_open_jobs": false, "scrape_all_companies": false }' | apify call michael.g/y-combinator-scraper --silent --output-dataset ``` ## MCP server setup ```json { "mcpServers": { "apify": { "type": "http", "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,michael.g/y-combinator-scraper" } } } ``` The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer ` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations). ## OpenAPI specification Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/wHFYMA8uTMrmdhjfK/builds/UuBVD89bF5NmA5yM9/openapi.json