Y Combinator Companies & Founders Scraper

Turn the entire YC startup directory into a clean, ready-to-use lead list — company details plus founder names, titles, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X profiles — without clicking through thousands of pages by hand.

If you sell to startups, recruit at startups, or run outreach campaigns for clients who do, this Actor gives you a fresh, structured dataset of every company that's been through Y Combinator, filterable by batch and industry, in minutes instead of days.

Who this is for

• Sales & BD reps building account lists of well-funded, high-growth startups to prospect into.
• Recruiters & talent agencies sourcing candidates or looking for founders and hiring leads at fast-moving companies.
• B2B agencies & investors tracking new batches, mapping competitive landscapes, or building deal flow pipelines.
• Growth marketers who need decision-maker contact points (founder name + LinkedIn) for personalized outreach at scale.

What you get

For every company matching your filters, one dataset row with:

Field	Description
company_name	Company name
batch	YC batch code, e.g. W26, S25
status	Company status, e.g. Active, Acquired, Public
tagline	One-line pitch
description	Full company description
website	Direct company website URL
yc_url	Link to the company's YC profile
team_size	Reported team size
location	HQ location
tags	Industry / product tags
founders	List of founders, each with name, role, linkedin_url, twitter_url

Export straight to Excel, Google Sheets, CSV, JSON, or push it to your CRM via API/webhook/integration.

How it works

This Actor doesn't screen-scrape a headless browser through thousands of page loads — it talks directly to the JSON data sources that power the YC directory itself:

1. Discovery — queries the same public search index YC's own website uses to power its directory search, filtered by your chosen batch and/or industry.
2. Extraction — visits each matching company's page and reads the structured company record embedded in it (the same data React uses to render the page), including the founder list with social links.

That means fast runs, low compute cost, and no CAPTCHA-fighting headless Chrome instances — while still returning every founder's LinkedIn and Twitter/X profile.

Input options

Field	Type	Description
batch	string	YC batch code, e.g. "W26", "S25", "F24". Use "All" (default) for every batch.
industry	string	Filter by industry/tag, e.g. "AI", "B2B", "Fintech", "Healthcare". Leave blank for all industries.
maxItems	integer	Maximum number of companies to return. Default 100.
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings. Residential proxies are used by default and strongly recommended.

Example input

{
  "batch": "S25",
  "industry": "AI",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Sample output

{
  "company_name": "DoorDash",
  "batch": "S13",
  "status": "Public",
  "tagline": "Restaurant delivery.",
  "description": "Founded in 2013, DoorDash is a San Francisco-based technology company...",
  "website": "http://doordash.com",
  "yc_url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/doordash",
  "team_size": 8600,
  "location": "San Francisco, US",
  "tags": ["Marketplace", "E-commerce"],
  "founders": [
    {
      "name": "Tony Xu",
      "role": "Founder/CEO",
      "twitter_url": null,
      "linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/xutony"
    }
  ]
}

Tips for best results

• Combine batch and industry to build tightly targeted lists (e.g. every AI company from the current batch).
• Run this on a schedule (Apify's built-in scheduler) to catch newly announced batches as soon as YC publishes them.
• Not every founder profile has a public Twitter/X or LinkedIn link listed on YC — those fields will be null when unavailable.

FAQ

Is this legal / against YC's terms? This Actor only reads publicly available information already shown to any visitor of ycombinator.com/companies — it does not access private, gated, or authenticated data. As with any scraping activity, use the data responsibly and in line with the target site's terms of service and applicable law.

How fast is it? Because it reads structured data directly instead of rendering pages in a browser, it typically processes companies far faster than a headless-browser scraper, at a fraction of the compute cost.

Can I get every company ever funded by YC? Yes — leave batch set to "All" and set maxItems high enough to cover the full directory (6,000+ companies as of 2026).