Y Combinator Scraper — Companies, Founders, Socials & Jobs

Disclaimer: This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Y Combinator or any of its subsidiaries. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. "Y Combinator" is referenced only to describe the publicly available website this Actor collects data from.

Extract the entire Y Combinator startup directory — every company across every batch (W05 → the latest cohort) with the full profile plus the data other YC scrapers skip: founders with their LinkedIn & Twitter/X, company social links (LinkedIn, X, Facebook, GitHub, Crunchbase), the YC group partner, and open job postings with salary & equity ranges. Turn ~6,000 funded startups into a ready-to-use B2B lead list, sourcing pipeline, or startup-intelligence dataset.

No login, no cookies, no browser — it reads YC's own public Algolia directory and profile pages directly, with a built-in monitor mode that surfaces only new companies, batches, and jobs.

Why this Y Combinator scraper?

Most YC scrapers dump the directory's basic columns and stop. This actor merges YC's public Algolia index (complete, fast, filterable) with each company's profile page to ship the richest YC dataset available — including founder contacts and company socials that make every row an actual lead.

Data	Typical YC scrapers	This actor
Company name, batch, status, team size, industry, location	✅	✅
One-liner + full long description	partial	✅
Tags, sub-industry, region, stage, top-company flag	partial	✅
Company website	✅	✅
Founders (name, title, bio)	❌	✅
Founder LinkedIn & Twitter/X	❌	✅
Company LinkedIn / X / Facebook / GitHub / Crunchbase	❌	✅
YC group partner, year founded, city/country	❌	✅
Open jobs (title, role, location, salary & equity)	❌	✅ opt-in
Full directory past Algolia's 1,000-result cap	partial	✅ (batch-sliced)
Monitor mode — only new companies / jobs	❌	✅

Use cases

• B2B lead generation — every YC company is a funded, fast-moving buyer. Export them with website, founders, and founder LinkedIn/Twitter to feed your CRM or outreach.
• Sourcing & recruiting — find founders and engineers by batch, industry, or tag; pull open roles with comp ranges straight from the directory.
• VC / competitive & market intelligence — track every batch, watch which industries and tags are growing, and monitor competitors and portfolio companies.
• Sales prospecting to startups — filter by batch, region, stage, and "is hiring" to build targeted lists of companies likely to buy dev tools, infra, fintech, and services.
• Datasets & dashboards — build and maintain a clean YC startup database for analytics and research.

How to use

1. Sign up for Apify — the free plan is enough to try this actor.
2. Open the Y Combinator Scraper, set filters (batch, industry, region, status…) or paste a YC directory URL, and click Start.
3. Watch companies — with founders and socials — stream into the dataset.
4. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or RSS — or pull results via the Apify API.

Input

{
    "batches": ["Summer 2024", "Winter 2025"],
    "industries": ["B2B", "Fintech"],
    "isHiring": true,
    "enrichProfile": true,
    "includeJobs": true,
    "maxItems": 500,
    "onlyNewItems": false
}

• batches / industries / subindustries / regions / tags / statuses / stages — directory filters (leave empty to sweep everything).
• query — optional free-text search.
• startUrls — paste a YC directory search URL (its filters are read automatically) or specific …/companies/{slug} profile URLs.
• isHiring / topCompaniesOnly / nonprofit — quick boolean filters.
• enrichProfile (default true) — open each company's profile for founders, socials, partner, year founded, media. Turn off for a fast directory-only pull.
• includeJobs (default false) — also output each company's open jobs as separate job records.
• maxItems (default 100) — cap the number of companies. The default keeps runs fast; set 0 for no limit (the full ~6,000) once your filters are dialed in.
• onlyNewItems (monitor mode) — emit only companies/jobs not seen in previous runs.

Output

One record per company (type: "company"), plus optional job records. Use the Companies / Jobs dataset views to switch columns.

{
    "type": "company",
    "id": "271",
    "name": "Airbnb",
    "slug": "airbnb",
    "ycUrl": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/airbnb",
    "website": "http://airbnb.com",
    "oneLiner": "Book accommodations around the world.",
    "batchName": "Winter 2009",
    "batchSeason": "Winter",
    "batchYear": 2009,
    "batchCode": "W09",
    "status": "Public",
    "stage": "Growth",
    "teamSize": 6132,
    "industry": "Consumer",
    "subindustry": "Consumer -> Travel, Leisure and Tourism",
    "tags": ["Marketplace", "Travel"],
    "regions": ["United States of America"],
    "location": "San Francisco, CA, USA",
    "topCompany": true,
    "isHiring": false,
    "yearFounded": 2008,
    "linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/airbnb",
    "twitterUrl": "https://twitter.com/airbnb",
    "githubUrl": null,
    "crunchbaseUrl": "https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/airbnb",
    "ycPartner": "...",
    "founders": [
        { "name": "Brian Chesky", "title": "Founder/CEO", "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianchesky/", "twitter": "https://twitter.com/bchesky" }
    ],
    "foundersCount": 3,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-14T12:00:00.000Z"
}

A job record (type: "job") carries companyName, companySlug, batchName, jobTitle, role, location, remote, minSalary/maxSalary, minEquity/maxEquity, experience and applyUrl.

What to expect (field coverage)

YC data is founder-entered, so some fields appear only when the company filled them in. Across the directory you can typically expect: company core fields (name, batch, status, team size, industry, website) ~100%; one-liner ~99%; founders ~95% (with enrichProfile); founder LinkedIn ~80% and Twitter/X ~45% (where founders listed them); company socials and jobs when published. A blank field means it wasn't published — not that scraping failed.

How much does it cost to scrape Y Combinator?

This Actor uses Apify's pay-per-event pricing: you are charged only for the results it delivers, with no monthly rental and no start fee. The events it can charge are:

• Company Scraped - One YC company: full profile (batch, status, stage, team size, industry, location, tags, website, description) + founders with LinkedIn/Twitter + company social links.
• Job Scraped - One open YC job: title, role, location, salary & equity ranges, experience, apply URL.

The current price of each event is shown on the Pricing tab of this page. Set a maximum total charge on the run if you want a hard cap on spend, and use the input limits to control how much the Actor fetches.

Automate & schedule

• Apify API — start runs, fetch datasets, manage schedules over REST.
• apify-client for JavaScript & Python — official SDKs.
• Schedules — run it daily/weekly with monitor mode to get every new YC company, batch, and job automatically — perfect for sourcing and sales alerts.
• Webhooks — push new companies/leads to your CRM, Slack, or sheet the moment a run finishes.

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'MY_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('scrapesage/ycombinator-scraper').call({
    batches: ['Summer 2024'],
    isHiring: true,
    enrichProfile: true,
    includeJobs: true,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(`Got ${items.length} YC companies & jobs`);

Integrate with any app

Connect the dataset to 5,000+ apps — no code required:

• Make — multi-step automation scenarios.
• Zapier — push new YC leads straight into your CRM.
• Slack — get alerted when a new batch or company appears.
• Google Drive / Sheets — auto-export every run to a spreadsheet.
• Airbyte — pipe results into your data warehouse.
• GitHub — trigger runs from commits or releases.

Use with AI assistants (MCP)

The output is clean, LLM-ready JSON. Call this actor from Claude, ChatGPT, or any agent framework through the Apify MCP server — ask your assistant to "list the Summer 2024 YC fintech companies that are hiring, with founder LinkedIns" and let it run the scraper.

Agent-ready: autonomous payments (x402 & Skyfire)

This actor is agent-ready — AI agents can discover it, run it, and pay for it autonomously, with no Apify account and no human in the loop. It uses pay-per-event pricing and limited permissions, so it qualifies for Apify's agentic-payment standards:

• x402 — an open, HTTP-native payment protocol. Agents pay per run in USDC on the Base network directly through the Apify MCP server — no account, no API key.
• Skyfire — agent-to-service payments for fully autonomous AI-agent workflows.

Building an AI agent, MCP tool, or autonomous data pipeline? This scraper is ready to plug in and pay as it goes.

More scrapers from scrapesage

Build a complete startup & B2B intelligence / lead-gen stack:

• Product Hunt Scraper — launches, makers & leads (the perfect companion to YC).
• Multi-ATS Job Scraper — jobs from Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby & Workday (the ATSs YC startups use).
• LinkedIn Jobs Scraper — filter-based job postings, no login.
• LinkedIn Ad Library Scraper — competitor B2B ads & creatives.
• Google Ads Transparency Scraper — who's advertising what on Google.
• Facebook Ad Library Scraper — competitor ad intelligence on Meta & Instagram.
• Yellow Pages Scraper — local business leads with emails.
• Singapore Company Scraper — UEN, registry & business leads.

Tips

• Full directory: leave filters empty and maxItems: 0 — the actor sweeps batch-by-batch to pull all ~6,000 companies past Algolia's 1,000-result cap.
• Founders & contacts: keep enrichProfile on — it's the difference between a company name and a contactable founder lead.
• Incremental sourcing: turn on onlyNewItems + an Apify Schedule to capture each new YC company/batch/job as it lands.
• Paste-a-URL: copy any filtered URL from the YC companies page and drop it into startUrls — the filters carry over.

FAQ

How do I scrape a specific batch or industry? Use the batches / industries filters (full names as shown on YC, e.g. Summer 2024, Fintech), or paste a filtered YC directory URL into startUrls.

Does it need a login or API key? No. It reads YC's public Algolia directory and public profile pages — no key or login.

Can I get all ~6,000 companies? Yes. The actor slices the directory by batch so it retrieves the entire index, not just the first 1,000 results.

Where do founder LinkedIn/Twitter links come from? From each company's public YC profile, where founders list them. Coverage is high for LinkedIn, lower for Twitter/X — when a founder didn't list one, the field is simply absent.

How do I get alerted to new YC companies or jobs? Turn on onlyNewItems and create an Apify Schedule; each run emits only what's new. Add a webhook or Zapier zap to push them onward.

Can I export to Google Sheets, CSV, or Excel? Yes — one click in the dataset view, or automatically via the Google Drive integration.

Is scraping Y Combinator legal? This actor collects publicly available data only. You are responsible for using the data in compliance with applicable laws (e.g. GDPR/CCPA for personal data) and YC's terms.

Data & lawful use

This Actor reads business and professional listings that the professionals themselves published to be found: names, roles, firms, ratings and the contact details shown on the public listing. Because those details belong to identifiable people, treat the output as personal data. If you are in the EU or UK you are the data controller for what you do with it: have a lawful basis (usually legitimate interest for B2B prospecting or market research), keep any outreach relevant to the professional's line of work, honour opt-outs and deletion requests, and do not use the output for spam.

Under Apify's Standard Actor Contract, which governs your use of this Actor, you are the controller of any personal data in your input and output and scrapesage acts only as your processor: that data is processed solely to run your job, written only to your own Apify storage, never used for any other purpose and never shared onward. If you need help with a data-subject request that involves this Actor's output, open an issue on the Issues tab.

Disclaimer

This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Y Combinator or any of its subsidiaries. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

"Y Combinator" and any related marks are the property of their respective owners and are used here only in a descriptive, nominative sense - to identify the publicly accessible website from which this Actor collects data. This Actor is not an official Y Combinator product, is not authorised or certified by Y Combinator, and does not distribute Y Combinator software. It collects only publicly available information; you are responsible for ensuring your use of that data complies with applicable laws, regulations and the terms of the source website.

Need help?

Open an issue on the actor's Issues tab, or visit the Apify help center. Feature requests are welcome — this actor is actively maintained.