Y Combinator Scraper - YC Companies, Jobs & Startup Directory

What does Y Combinator Scraper do?

Input: YC batches, industries, locations, status or keywords (or a list of YC company links); choose companies or jobs. Output: one row per YC company (with founders' names, links and open jobs) or one row per open job (with salary, equity and visa). Price: $2 per 1,000 companies with profile details, $0.50 per 1,000 with directory fields only, $1 per 1,000 jobs; filtered-out and failed items are free; no start fee.

It exports the Y Combinator startup directory (all 6,000+ YC companies since 2005) as clean rows, and the open jobs those startups post on their YC pages:

• 🏢 Companies: name, batch (e.g. Fall 2026), status (Active, Acquired, Inactive, Public), one-liner, description, website and domain, team size, industry, sub-industry, tags, locations, regions, stage, hiring flag, YC top company flag, logo.
• 🔗 Profile details from each company's YC page: founders' names and titles, year founded, city and country, company LinkedIn, X, GitHub and Crunchbase links, YC group partner, open job titles, Launch YC posts and press links.
• 💼 Jobs mode: every open job of the matching companies with salary range, equity range, location, remote flag, role, specialty, minimum experience, visa requirement and skills.
• 🔎 Filters: batches (codes like W26, names like "Summer 2025" or a whole year), status, industries and tags, locations, keywords, hiring only, top companies, stage, team size; job role, job keywords, job location, minimum USD salary.
• 🔔 Only new for schedules: companies that are new in the directory, changed status (e.g. Active → Acquired) or started hiring; in jobs mode, jobs not seen before. Everything unchanged is skipped for free.

Why this Actor?

• Companies, founders and jobs in one Actor, with filters on both, instead of separate company and job scrapers.
• Change alerts: new batch companies, acquisitions and companies that start hiring, not only "new rows".
• Fast and cheap: the whole directory (6,269 companies) in 23 seconds for $3.13 with directory fields, or $2 per 1,000 companies with profile details; jobs $1 per 1,000.
• Honest access: our TidyTools user agent, ycombinator.com/robots.txt respected (only public company pages are read, about 2.5 per second), no logins.

Real results (3-4 October 2026)

• Default input (Fall 2026 + Summer 2026 batches, 20 companies with profile details): 341 companies matched, 20 returned in 11.9 seconds, $0.04.
• Jobs mode, all 2026 batches, engineering roles: 200 jobs from 131 hiring startups in 55 seconds, $0.20; 126 non-engineering jobs dropped for free. 174 of the 200 had a USD salary range, 18 were remote.
• The whole directory with directory fields only: 6,269 companies in 23 seconds, $3.13.
• "Only new" on the Fall 2026 batch: first run 110 companies ($0.055), second run 0 changes, $0.
• Specific companies: Airbnb (Winter 2009, Public, 6,132 people, 3 founders, YC partner listed), Stripe (Summer 2009, 3 open jobs), Dropbox; an unknown name and an unknown slug came back as free not_found rows.

Use cases

• Sales and partnerships: newest YC companies by industry and city, with website and founders' names, every batch as soon as it is listed.
• Recruiting and job seekers: all open YC startup jobs with salary, equity and visa, filtered by role and location; daily alerts for new jobs.
• VC and market research: batch composition by industry and region, status changes (acquired, inactive), hiring momentum.
• Lead enrichment: domain, LinkedIn and team size for a list of YC companies (put their YC links under "Specific companies").

How to use it

1. What to return: companies or jobs.
2. Choose batches (W26, "Summer 2025", "2024" ...) and other filters, or list specific companies by YC link, slug or exact name. Lists can be pasted one per line or separated by ;, , or tabs; a company listed twice in different spellings is read and charged once. Commas normally separate company names (Airbnb, Stripe). A limited CSV row such as Airbnb, Winter 2009, San Francisco selects only Airbnb when the first cell uniquely matches a directory company, the second is a YC batch, and no later cell identifies another YC company; the batch and later non-company cells are ignored. Use tabs for other spreadsheet layouts.
3. Companies mode: keep Profile details on for founders, links and jobs, or turn it off for the cheap directory export.
4. Jobs mode: optional roles, job keywords, job locations, minimum USD salary.
5. For alerts: turn on Only new, give a Monitor name and schedule the task (Apify Console → Schedules).

Input example

{
    "mode": "jobs",
    "batches": ["2026", "2025"],
    "industries": ["B2B", "Developer Tools"],
    "jobRoles": ["eng"],
    "jobLocations": ["San Francisco", "Remote"],
    "minSalaryUsd": 150000,
    "maxResults": 300,
    "onlyNew": true,
    "monitorName": "yc-eng-jobs"
}

Output example

A company with profile details (real result, 4 October 2026, shortened):

{
    "type": "company",
    "name": "Stripe",
    "slug": "stripe",
    "batch": "Summer 2009",
    "batchCode": "S09",
    "status": "Active",
    "oneLiner": "Economic infrastructure for the internet.",
    "website": "http://stripe.com",
    "domain": "stripe.com",
    "teamSize": 7000,
    "industry": "Fintech",
    "tags": ["Banking as a Service", "Fintech", "SaaS"],
    "locations": "San Francisco, CA, USA",
    "stage": "Growth",
    "isHiring": true,
    "topCompany": true,
    "yearFounded": 2009,
    "linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/stripe/",
    "twitterUrl": "https://twitter.com/stripe",
    "githubUrl": "https://github.com/stripe",
    "founders": [
        { "name": "Patrick Collison", "title": "Founder/CEO", "isActive": true },
        { "name": "John Collison", "title": "Founder/President", "isActive": true }
    ],
    "founderNames": "Patrick Collison, John Collison",
    "openJobs": 3,
    "jobTitles": ["Frontend Engineer, Identity", "Machine Learning Engineer, Identity", "Head of Engineering, Identity Graph"],
    "news": [{ "title": "Stripe: 2023 CNBC Disruptor 50", "url": "https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/09/stripe-disruptor-50.html", "date": "May 09, 2023" }],
    "ycUrl": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/stripe",
    "detailLevel": "profile",
    "charged": true
}

A job (jobs mode, shortened):

{
    "type": "job",
    "jobId": "111785",
    "title": "Software Engineer",
    "company": "Volaren Inc.",
    "batch": "Fall 2026",
    "location": "San Francisco, CA, US / Remote (US)",
    "remote": true,
    "role": "Engineering",
    "specialty": "AI engineer",
    "salaryRange": "$50K - $150K",
    "salaryMin": 50000,
    "salaryMax": 150000,
    "salaryCurrency": "USD",
    "equityRange": "5.00%",
    "minExperience": "1+ years",
    "visa": "US citizen/visa only",
    "postedAgo": "9 days",
    "jobUrl": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/volaren-inc/jobs/KfqM968-software-engineer",
    "companyWebsite": "https://www.volaren.ai",
    "companyTeamSize": 4,
    "charged": true
}

What the fields mean

• batch: the YC batch name; batchCode (with profile details) YC's short code (W26, S25, F24, P26/X25 for Spring).
• status: YC's directory status. change (Only new): new, status_changed (with previousStatus) or started_hiring.
• detailLevel: profile (YC page read) or directory (directory fields only; also when a page could not be read, then detailError says why and the row is charged at the basic price).
• founders: names and titles shown on the company's YC page. Founders' personal profiles, bios and photos are not returned.
• salaryMin / salaryMax / salaryCurrency: parsed from the salary range; postedAgo / lastActiveAgo are YC's own relative times.
• SUMMARY (key-value store): companies and jobs returned, directory size and date, pages read, rows dropped per filter, free errors by errorType.

How much does it cost?

Event	Price	When
Company with profile	$2.00 / 1,000 ($0.002 each)	one company with directory fields and its YC page details (founders, links, jobs, launches, news)
Company (directory fields)	$0.50 / 1,000 ($0.0005 each)	one company with directory fields only (profile details off, or its page could not be read)
Job	$1.00 / 1,000 ($0.001 each)	jobs mode: one open job after your filters

Free: companies and jobs dropped by your filters, unchanged companies and seen jobs in "Only new" mode, invalid inputs, companies not found, repeated entries of the same company, and companies whose page cannot be read in jobs mode. No start fee. Larger Apify plans get the usual volume discount (Silver 10%, Gold and above 20%).

Examples: a new batch of about 200 companies with profiles: $0.40. Every open engineering job at 2025-2026 YC startups (a few hundred): under $1. A daily "Only new" check of a batch: usually $0.

For comparison (Apify Store, 4 October 2026): parsebird/yc-jobs-scraper $0.0028 per job (106 users in the last 30 days), nomad-agent/ycombinator-was-scraper $0.0025, scrapesage/ycombinator-scraper $0.003, haketa/ycombinator-companies-scraper $0.0025 per company, memo23/y-combinator-scraper and fatihtahta/y-combinator-directory-scraper $0.001, michael.g/y-combinator-scraper $0.15.

Control your cost

• Max results caps companies (newest first) or jobs.
• At the start the run logs the worst case and compares it with your maximum charge per run; when the next item could pass it, the run stops (SUMMARY.status: LIMIT_REACHED, SUMMARY.notProcessed).
• Every row has charged: true or false; free rows say "(not charged)". If Apify restarts the run, finished companies are not charged again.

Use it from code

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/tidytools~y-combinator-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"batches":["W26"],"industries":["Fintech"],"maxResults":50}'

With AI agents (MCP): connect Apify's MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com?tools=tidytools/y-combinator-scraper) to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask, for example, "Which YC Summer 2026 companies build developer tools, and who founded them?". Minimal input: {"batches": ["S26"], "industries": ["Developer Tools"]}. Failed items are not charged and carry an errorType.

Limitations

• Directory source: the company list comes from the open yc-oss dataset, rebuilt every day from YC's public directory, so a brand-new company can appear up to a day later. Profile details and jobs are read live from each company's public page on ycombinator.com.
• Only publicly launched companies: YC lists a company once it launches publicly; stealth companies are not in the directory.
• Jobs are the ones a company lists on its YC page (Work at a Startup). Applying needs a free YC account; this Actor does not log in or apply.
• No emails: YC pages do not show founders' emails, and this Actor does not guess them.
• Team size and status are what the company reports to YC and may lag reality.

Responsible use

• The Actor returns company information and the founders' names and titles that YC publishes on each company's public page. It does not return founders' personal profiles, bios, photos, emails or phone numbers.
• Do you only need company data? Turn off Founder names and titles (includeFounders): founders, founderNames and founderCount are then left out.
• You are responsible for how you use the data: follow data-protection and anti-spam laws (GDPR, CAN-SPAM, CASL) when you contact people, and honour opt-out requests.

FAQ

Does the Actor collect usage data? The Actor sends one anonymous usage counter per run (input type, item count range, outcome) to improve the tool; no URLs, content or account data.

What if my input is wrong (unknown batch, status, stage, mode or job role)? The run ends normally with one free invalid_input row that names the problem and the accepted values; nothing is read or charged. The same happens for a yes/no option, filter number or Max results that cannot be read ("true", "150,000" and "150k" are read fine), so a typo never returns or charges more than you asked for. Names in "Specific companies" that are not in the directory give a free not_found row each, a name shared by several YC companies (e.g. "Apollo") gives a free invalid_input row listing their links, and the other companies are still returned. If the company directory cannot be loaded, the run ends the same way with a free directory_unavailable row.

What if nothing matches my filters? You get one free no_results row saying how many companies each filter dropped, and whether a batch you asked for is not in the directory yet (with the newest batches). In jobs mode it says which job filters dropped the jobs. An "Only new" run with nothing new ends without rows.

I listed the same company twice (link, slug and name). Am I charged twice? No. Every spelling of one company is read and charged once; the repeats are listed in SUMMARY.duplicateInputs. Commas still separate company lists (Airbnb, Stripe); a recognized company, YC batch, other fields CSV row selects one company as described above. Spreadsheet rows pasted with tabs use the first cell that is a YC link or company name.

How do I get only the newest batch? Put its code in Batches, e.g. F26, or "Fall 2026". A year (2026) covers all its batches.

What do W, S, F, X and P mean? Winter, Summer, Fall, and Spring (YC writes Spring as X25 and P26). Full names like "Summer 2025" work too.

Can I track acquisitions? Yes: schedule companies mode with "Only new". Companies whose status changes (for example to Acquired or Inactive) come back with change: "status_changed" and previousStatus.

Why is a company missing? It may not be publicly launched yet, or be newer than the daily directory: list its YC page link under "Specific companies" (with Profile details on) to read it directly.

Is it allowed? The Actor reads public YC company pages allowed by ycombinator.com/robots.txt, slowly, with an honest user agent, and returns only company information and the founders' names and titles YC publishes.

Related Actors

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