ExploreYC
Your data layer for Y Combinator's startup ecosystem
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ExploreYC - Your data layer for Y Combinator's startup ecosystem

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Explore 5,773+ Y Combinator companies with powerful search, interactive maps, AI-powered company intelligence, hiring insights, funding data, and batch analytics. Find co-founders, validate startup ideas, and discover patterns across 20 years of YC history.

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Maker
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hey PH, my name is Konstantin, and I'm excited to launch ExploreYC - a comprehensive intelligence platform for exploring Y Combinator's entire portfolio of 5,773+ companies. as a founder researching YC companies, I found myself jumping between YC's directory, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and countless browser tabs. I wanted a single platform that could answer questions like: "Which YC companies in my space are hiring?" "What patterns do successful AI startups share?" "How does my startup idea compare to the YC portfolio?" .. so I built ExploreYC to solve this! it's key features are: - Smart Search & Filters: search across 5,773+ companies by name, industry, batch, location, hiring status, real-time data from YC's API + enriched with funding data - Interactive Global Map: Visualize YC companies worldwide, filter by batch, industry, hiring status, discover geographic clusters and trends - AI Company Intelligence: get instant AI-powered insights on any YC company, competitive analysis, market positioning, growth indicators - Advanced Analytics: Batch comparisons and trends over 20 years, Industry distribution and evolution, funding timeline visualization, hiring trends and patterns - Live Hiring Board: browse 1,400+ YC companies actively hiring, filter by role, location, batch, industry, direct links to career pages - Startup Idea Validator: check if your idea already exists in YC, find similar companies and their outcomes, get AI-powered validation feedback - YC Batch Wrapped: beautiful shareable infographics for each batch, industry breakdown, hiring stats, geographic distribution, social sharing optimized - Funding Analytics: track funding rounds across the portfolio, investor network visualization, funding trends by batch and industry

 Hi Konstantin, congrats on the launch. This is very useful, any plans to add other accels (techstars, a16z etc)

Maker

 would be interesting to do for sure. I plan to open source this project and let people contribute !

 the startup idea validator is the killer feature here. most founders are terrified of finding out their 'unique' idea was actually attempted in the s16 batch and failed. being able to find those similar companies and actually see their outcomes is way more valuable than just a generic 'good idea' from an ai. supported

Love the Wrapped feature--a great iteration on Spotify's idea. How far back does the history go? It would be epic to see the og 2005 YC graphic :)

Maker

 will add support for it 🔥

5,773 YC companies as a structured data layer is exactly the kind of work that compounds — once the dataset is well-shaped, every downstream question gets cheaper to answer. Did the same thing on the finance side at Eloquens () building project-finance / DCF / LBO templates as a structured catalogue (renewables-focused), and the lesson that surprised me was: volume isn't the moat, the schema is. Two well-shaped DCF templates with consistent assumption tables beat 200 sloppy ones every time. Curious how you're versioning the 20 years of YC history — do batches stay frozen, or do you re-derive metrics when YC's own definitions evolve (e.g. "AI" tag, "deep tech", etc.)?

Maker

Update: ExploreYC is now open source 🚀

the Product Hunt launch was something else - thank you to everyone who upvoted, broke things, DM'd ideas, and pinged me at 2am about edge cases.

because of that response I'm doing something I'd been thinking about for a while: opening the entire codebase.

the full stack is now on GitHub - React + FastAPI, the idea validator, the success predictor, the hiring board, the email digest pipeline, the cron handlers, all of it.

same code that's running at right now!

there are two ways to contribute:

- have an idea for a feature? Open an issue describing it. Even half-baked ones — I read everything.

- want to build it? Open a PR. First-time contributors very welcome — happy to review, pair on the hard bits, and ship anything good.

a few low-hanging fruits I'd love help with: better filters on the hiring board, batch-comparison views, plugging in non- YC data sources, and a proper CLI mode.

repo is here →

if you've been looking for an excuse to commit to a real, deployed product instead of another todo-app-final-v3.. this is it 🔥

 Awesome, just made a PR! :)

💡 Bright idea

Such a cool idea! I remember how you were manually checking startups that were being added to the new batches, but this website is much cooler. I made a PR with a couple of fixes and a new graph for the analytics so you can track industry focus through time 👀

Maker

let's see how we do

Maker

make sure to subscribe and get emails on newly added companies to YC every day. That way you can see patterns in what YC are searching for and early reach out to companies in very early stages!

Congrats looking to play with it more in the coming days. Subscribed already. The interactive map is pretty cool :)

Maker

 means a lot from you!

It would be useful to have an AI search for such companies. Is something like that planned? I would look into tourism with AI features, if such things even exist.

Maker

 you can search between all of the almost 6k companies with your idea yo ee if there are similar companies and so on.

Maker

 do you have anything more specific in mind?

 I couldn’t find where on the website you can enter a custom prompt and discover similar startups. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place?