🚀 Y Combinator Scraper

Y Combinator Scraper — Companies, Founders and Open Jobs as JSON

Y Combinator Scraper extracts structured data for every company matching a YC directory search — company description, batch, industry, stage, socials, founder details, and open job listings. Paste in a search URL from ycombinator.com/companies, and get back typed, normalized JSON with no HTML parsing on your end. Results save to the dataset the moment each company finishes, so a long run never loses completed work. Start a run and watch the first records land within seconds.

🚀 What is Y Combinator Scraper?

Y Combinator Scraper is an Apify Actor that turns one or more YC directory search URLs into structured company records — including founders and open jobs — without a headless browser. It queries the same search backend and detail pages the public directory itself uses, so no Y Combinator account or login is ever required. It's built for developers, growth and recruiting teams, and AI engineers who need YC's startup data as clean JSON instead of scraping the HTML themselves.

🔍 What Y Combinator company data is publicly available to scrape?

Everything on a company's public YC directory page — its profile, founders, and open jobs — is visible to any visitor without logging in; a small number of fields simply aren't published by YC at all, at any access level.

Data category	Publicly available	Not published by YC
Company profile (name, description, batch, industry, stage, status)	Yes	—
Company website and social links	Yes	—
Founder name, title, bio, LinkedIn, X	Yes	—
Founder email address	—	Only a "has email" flag is exposed, never the address
Open job title, description, location, salary, equity, skills	Yes	—
Revenue, funding amount, valuation	—	Not part of the public directory
YC application or interview data	—	Internal to YC, never public
Job applicant / candidate data	—	Visible only to the hiring company's own account

Y Combinator Scraper only returns publicly visible data — what any visitor sees. Nothing behind a login wall.

📊 What data can I extract with Y Combinator Scraper?

Every run returns one JSON record per company, covering identity and classification, metrics and links, plus nested founder and job objects.

Field name	Description
url	Company's profile URL on the YC directory
company_id	Numeric company ID assigned by YC
company_name	Company name
company_image	Company logo URL
short_description	One-line company description ("one-liner")
long_description	Full company description
batch	YC batch, e.g. "Spring 2026"
industry	Primary industry
subindustry	Sub-industry, derived from YC's category tree
stage	Company growth stage
status	Company status, e.g. "Active"
tags	Additional industry/topic tags, or null
website	Company's own website URL
year_founded	Year the company was founded
team_size	Number of employees, as reported to YC
company_location	Company headquarters location
company_linkedin	Company LinkedIn URL
company_x	Company X (Twitter) URL
company_facebook	Company Facebook URL
company_crunchbase	Company Crunchbase URL
company_github	Company GitHub URL
primary_partner	YC partner mentoring the company
top_company	YC "top company" flag
nonprofit	Nonprofit flag
is_hiring	Whether the company currently has open roles
number_of_open_jobs	Open job count — always included, even when job details aren't scraped
open_jobs	Full job listings — populated only when Scrape Open Jobs is on
founders	Founder objects — populated only when Scrape Founders is on

Company identity and classification

url, company_id, company_name, company_image, short_description, long_description, batch, industry, subindustry, stage, status, tags — what the company is, what it's called, and how YC categorizes it.

Metrics, flags and links

website, year_founded, team_size, company_location, company_linkedin, company_x, company_facebook, company_crunchbase, company_github, primary_partner, top_company, nonprofit, is_hiring, number_of_open_jobs — the numeric, boolean, and link fields.

Founders and open jobs (nested objects)

Each entry in founders returns id, name, title, bio, emails ({available, email, status}), linkedin, x. Each entry in open_jobs returns id, title, description_url, description, location, remote, type, role, salary, equity, skills, years_experience, visa.

⚠️ emails.email and emails.status are always null. YC's directory exposes only emails.available — a true/false flag for whether the founder has listed an email with YC — never the address itself.

🤖 Add-on: Need additional Y Combinator data?

Pair this Actor with LinkedIn People Profile Scraper to pull full LinkedIn profile data for a founder beyond the linkedin URL, or Twitter X Profile Viewer to enrich a founder's x handle with bio, follower count, and recent posts. For a company's own site content rather than its YC listing, Website Content Crawler can crawl the website field directly.

🆚 Why not build this yourself?

Y Combinator does not publish a public API for its startup directory, so the only way to get this data programmatically is to scrape it — and doing that reliably means more than a simple HTML fetch. The directory's search runs on a client-side Algolia index whose credentials live inside the page's JavaScript and can rotate; this Actor live-extracts them on every run and falls back to a pinned value if extraction fails. Company detail pages embed their data as an Inertia.js JSON blob, not stable HTML markup, so a naive scraper breaks the moment YC ships a frontend change. And YC does rate-limit and block aggressive scraping, which means building and maintaining your own proxy-escalation logic. Y Combinator Scraper already handles all three, plus the search backend's 1,000-result-per-query cap, so you get structured records without owning that maintenance burden.

▶️ How to use Y Combinator Scraper

Y Combinator Scraper runs on the Apify platform — no separate signup or API key is needed to try it in Console.

1. Open Y Combinator Scraper on its Apify Store listing and click Try for free (or Start).
2. Go to the YC directory, apply the filters you want, copy the URL, and paste it into 🔍 YC Companies Search URL(s) — the only required input.
3. Toggle 👥 Scrape Founders and 💼 Scrape Open Jobs depending on what you need; adjust 🎯 Maximum Companies if you want a smaller sample.
4. Click Start.
5. Watch results arrive live in the Output tab, or download the full dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel once the run finishes.

Scaling to bulk company extraction

The urls input is an array, so pasting several YC directory search URLs (different batches, industries, or stages) into one run merges and de-duplicates every match into a single dataset — no need to run the Actor once per filter. For the entire directory instead of a filtered search, enable 🌍 Scrape ALL Companies, which ignores urls and maxCompanies and pulls all 5,500+ funded companies across every batch.

💡 What can you do with Y Combinator company data?

• A growth marketer building a partnership list uses industry, batch, and website to shortlist recently-funded companies in a target vertical before outreach.
• A recruiter sourcing candidates uses is_hiring and number_of_open_jobs to find actively-hiring startups, then pulls open_jobs for the exact roles and salary ranges on offer.
• A sales development rep uses founders[].linkedin and founders[].title to identify the right decision-maker at each company before connecting.
• A market researcher aggregates industry, subindustry, and batch across thousands of records to chart which sectors YC is funding batch-over-batch.
• An AI engineer feeds long_description and founders[].bio into a RAG pipeline so an agent can answer natural-language questions about YC's startup portfolio with source-grounded context.

🛡️ How does Y Combinator Scraper handle rate limits and blocking?

By default, every request goes directly to Y Combinator with no proxy, for maximum speed. If a request comes back rejected or blocked (HTTP 403, 429, or a 5xx server error), the Actor automatically escalates through a proxy ladder — no proxy → Apify Proxy datacenter → Apify Proxy residential — retrying up to 3 times on residential before giving up on that one request. Once the run escalates to residential, it stays there for every remaining request rather than dropping back down. Separately, a genuine network failure (timeout, DNS error, connection reset) is retried with backoff; ⏱️ Delay Between Requests and ⚡ Max Concurrency let you pace requests to avoid triggering rate limits in the first place.

⚠️ If 12 consecutive requests fail to reach Y Combinator at all — a connectivity problem, not a block — the run stops early and keeps whatever was already scraped, rather than retrying indefinitely.

⬇️ Input

Y Combinator Scraper accepts the parameters below, defined in input_schema.json. Only urls is required.

Parameter	Required	Type	Description	Example value
urls	Yes	array	One or more Y Combinator directory search URLs (bulk supported). Apply filters on the YC directory (batch, industry, region, stage, tags, hiring status, ...), copy the full URL, and paste it here — one per line, or upload a file. Every result across all pasted URLs is merged and de-duplicated.	["https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026"]
scrapeFounders	No	boolean	When enabled, each company record includes its founders — name, title, bio, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), and email availability. Default true.	true
scrapeOpenJobs	No	boolean	When enabled, each company record includes its full open-job listings — title, description, location, salary, equity, skills, and more. Leave off for faster runs if you only need the job count. Default false.	false
maxCompanies	No	integer	Stop after this many companies (across all search URLs combined). Leave empty for no limit. Default 10, minimum 1.	25
scrapeAllCompanies	No	boolean	Set to true to scrape every company in the YC directory (5,500+, all batches). When enabled, urls and maxCompanies are ignored entirely. Default false.	false
proxyConfiguration	No	object	By default the Actor connects to Y Combinator with no proxy for maximum speed, and auto-escalates through datacenter and residential tiers if blocked. Force a specific tier here if needed.	{ "useApifyProxy": false }
maxConcurrency	No	integer	How many companies to enrich in parallel. Higher is faster but more likely to trigger rate limiting. Default 5, minimum 1, maximum 20.	5
requestDelay	No	number	Optional polite delay before each request, in seconds. Float values are supported. Default 0, minimum 0, maximum 10.	0.5
maxRetries	No	integer	How many times to retry a single request on a network error or server hiccup (5xx) before giving up on that attempt. Default 3, minimum 1, maximum 5.	3

Direct API callers may also pass startUrls as an alternate key name for urls.

Example input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026&industry=B2B"
  ],
  "scrapeFounders": true,
  "scrapeOpenJobs": true,
  "maxCompanies": 25,
  "scrapeAllCompanies": false,
  "maxConcurrency": 5,
  "requestDelay": 0.5,
  "maxRetries": 3
}

⬆️ Output

Y Combinator Scraper writes one typed, normalized JSON record per company to the dataset, with a stable field order and consistent schema across runs. Download results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML from the Output tab, or via the Apify API.

Example output

{
  "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/akkari",
  "company_id": 31576,
  "company_name": "Akkari",
  "company_image": "https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/akkari.png",
  "short_description": "Autonomous Customer Operations",
  "long_description": "Akkari runs the operational work from the first sales call through expansion, replacing manual customer ops with an AI-driven workflow.",
  "batch": "Spring 2026",
  "industry": "B2B",
  "subindustry": "B2B",
  "stage": "Early",
  "status": "Active",
  "tags": ["Artificial Intelligence", "SaaS"],
  "website": "https://akkari.io/",
  "year_founded": "2026",
  "team_size": "5",
  "company_location": "San Francisco",
  "company_linkedin": null,
  "company_x": null,
  "company_facebook": null,
  "company_crunchbase": null,
  "company_github": null,
  "primary_partner": "Aaron Epstein",
  "top_company": false,
  "nonprofit": false,
  "is_hiring": true,
  "number_of_open_jobs": 1,
  "open_jobs": [
    {
      "id": 48213,
      "title": "Founding Engineer",
      "description_url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/akkari/jobs/founding-engineer",
      "description": "Build the core workflow engine that powers Akkari's customer operations platform...",
      "location": "San Francisco, CA",
      "remote": false,
      "type": "Full-time",
      "role": "Engineering, Full stack",
      "salary": "$120K - $180K",
      "equity": "0.50% - 1.50%",
      "skills": ["Python", "TypeScript", "PostgreSQL"],
      "years_experience": "2",
      "visa": null
    }
  ],
  "founders": [
    {
      "id": 33963,
      "name": "Jeffrey Byun",
      "title": "Founder/CEO",
      "bio": "2x YC founder (W11, P26), CEO of Akkari, and former bond trader.",
      "emails": { "available": true, "email": null, "status": null },
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffbyun/",
      "x": "https://twitter.com/jeffbyun"
    }
  ]
}

⚙️ How does it work?

Y Combinator Scraper talks to the same two backends the public directory uses in a browser: Algolia's search index for the company list, and the directory's own Inertia.js-powered detail pages for founders, socials, and job postings. Every request goes through impit, an HTTP client that impersonates a real Chrome browser at the network level — no headless browser is launched. Requests start with no proxy for speed; if Y Combinator rejects one, the Actor automatically escalates through Apify Proxy's datacenter and residential tiers, retrying on residential before giving up on that request. Only data visible on YC's own public pages is ever returned, and the output schema — the same fields, in the same order — stays fixed regardless of how YC's frontend markup changes, because the parsing logic that maps YC's page structure to this schema lives in one isolated module.

🔌 Integrations

Y Combinator Scraper works with the tools you already use for automation and AI — call it directly over HTTP, wire it into a no-code workflow, or reach it as an agent tool.

Calling Y Combinator Scraper programmatically

import requests

response = requests.post(
    "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/<ACTOR_ID>/run-sync-get-dataset-items",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN"},
    json={
        "urls": ["https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026"],
        "scrapeFounders": True,
    },
)
companies = response.json()

Works in Go, Ruby, Node.js, cURL — any language that can make an HTTP request.

No-code tools (n8n, Make, LangChain)

In n8n, use the HTTP Request node pointed at the run-sync-get-dataset-items endpoint above, with your Apify token as a Bearer header. In Make, use the Apify app's built-in "Run Actor and get dataset items" module and map urls from an earlier step. In LangChain, the community ApifyWrapper / langchain-apify integration can call any Apify Actor as a tool and load the returned dataset items as Document objects for a retrieval chain.

Any Apify Actor, this one included, can also be reached through the Apify MCP server as a callable tool from Claude, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible clients.

⚖️ Is it legal to scrape Y Combinator companies?

Yes — scraping publicly available business data, such as a startup directory, is generally lawful in most jurisdictions, and Y Combinator Scraper only returns data already visible to any visitor on YC's public company pages. The company records (name, description, batch, industry, socials) are business data, not personal data, so they fall under Y Combinator's terms of service and database-rights framing rather than a personal-data privacy regime. The founders array is different: names, bios, and social profile links are personal data about identifiable individuals, so GDPR/CCPA considerations — a lawful basis for storing and using that data — apply if you enable scrapeFounders. Consult legal counsel if your use case involves bulk storage of personal data.

❓ Frequently asked questions

What Y Combinator company fields does Y Combinator Scraper return?

The top fields are company_name, short_description, batch, industry, and is_hiring, plus nested founders and open_jobs objects when enabled. See What data can I extract above for the full field list.

Does Y Combinator Scraper require a YC account or login?

No. Every field comes from Y Combinator's public directory pages, and the Actor makes plain HTTP requests with no authentication — no YC account, cookie, or login is used or required.

How many companies can I extract in one run?

maxCompanies defaults to 10 but can be raised or left empty for no cap, and scrapeAllCompanies pulls the entire directory (5,500+ companies) in one run. Internally, when a single search matches more than 1,000 companies — the search backend's per-query cap — the Actor automatically splits the query by batch and merges the results, so the 1,000-hit cap never limits what you can extract.

What happens if a search URL returns zero companies?

The run logs a warning — "No companies matched your search — nothing to scrape" — and finishes without pushing any dataset items or charging any events. Double-check the filters on the search URL if this happens unexpectedly.

Can I scrape multiple Y Combinator search URLs at once?

Yes. urls accepts an array, so pasting several directory search URLs (different batches, industries, or stages) into one run merges and de-duplicates every match into a single dataset, instead of running the Actor once per filter.

Does Y Combinator Scraper work with Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI agent tools?

Yes. It's callable as an HTTP endpoint by any agent framework, and reachable through the Apify MCP server for Claude, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible clients.

Does Y Combinator Scraper include YC's separate "Work at a Startup" job board?

No. open_jobs comes from each company's own detail-page job postings on the main directory, not from the separate workatastartup.com site — so job data is scoped to the companies your search matches, not the wider YC job board.

Does Y Combinator Scraper return data in a format LLMs can use directly?

Yes. Every record is typed, normalized JSON with consistent field names across runs — no HTML parsing or CSS selectors required. Pass it directly to an LLM's context window, index it into a vector store, or feed it to an agent tool.

What happens when Y Combinator changes its layout or anti-bot system?

The Actor's parsing logic is isolated in one module that's maintained to track YC's directory, and the output schema stays stable across those updates so downstream integrations don't break. No specific update turnaround is promised.

Can I use Y Combinator Scraper without managing proxies or browser infrastructure?

Yes. The Actor starts every run with no proxy and automatically escalates through Apify Proxy's datacenter and residential tiers only if Y Combinator rejects a request — you never have to configure or pay for proxies yourself unless you choose to force a specific tier.

Which Y Combinator fields work best for AI training data and RAG indexing?

For RAG, index long_description, short_description, and founders[].bio — the high-information free text fields. For training data, industry, subindustry, batch, and stage are the most consistently structured fields across every record, and every field is returned as a typed primitive (string, integer, boolean, or array) rather than raw HTML.

🔗 Related scrapers

Scraper	What it extracts
LinkedIn People Profile Scraper	Full LinkedIn profile data for any person, including YC founders
Twitter X Profile Viewer	Public X (Twitter) profile data for founders and companies
Website Content Crawler	Full text content crawled from a startup's own website
Greenhouse Job Scraper	Job listings from any company using the Greenhouse ATS
Ats Jobs API	Job listings aggregated across multiple applicant-tracking systems
Shopify Store Leads Scraper - Emails, Phones & Ratings	Business contact leads (emails, phones, ratings) from Shopify stores

🛟 Your feedback

Found a bug or missing a field? Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab in Apify Console, or email dev.scraperengine@gmail.com — we read every report and it helps us keep the scraper in sync with Y Combinator's site.