ExploreYC - Open-source API for Y Combinator & a16z company data
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One open-source API for startup data across Y Combinator AND a16z - 6,600+ companies with funding, stage, IPO/M&A exits, and founders. Filter by VC (yc/a16z/all), batch, industry, country, or search. Grab a free API key, read the docs (curl/Node/Python + Swagger), and build in 30 seconds. Plus the full web app: map, analytics, funding data, a live hiring board, and AI tools.
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ExploreYC
FetchSandbox
@konstantimb link gives 404
@konstantimb Nice, this has been long over due! Congrats on the launch!
YourSitee
Nice to see ExploreYC back. I remember trying the earlier version for startup/category research, and the API edition feels like the more powerful direction. YC + a16z in one open-source dataset is useful not just for browsing, but for actually building tools on top of it.
The thing I would probably build first is a category research layer: search a market, see funded companies, batches, exits, hiring signals, geography, and similar companies in one place. Curious how you handle data freshness and corrections over time. if a company pivots, gets acquired, shuts down, or changes category, can the community help update the dataset?
ExploreYC
@andrasczeizel Amazing man! You are free to do whatever you like - fork the repo, add a PR - build anything you want over this data!
we basically have cron jobs running hourly/daily to get snapshots of companies today vs. yesterday adn detect new companies added to some batch. there are a bunch more hacks, but ey - clone the repo, drop it to calude and it will spill you all the secrets :D
this is genuinely useful, I do scout-style research on companies and the tab-juggling between YC's directory, a16z's site and Crunchbase is exactly the annoying part you described. question about durability though: since the ingestion pipeline hits YC's internal Algolia endpoint rather than a documented public API, what's your plan if YC changes that index's config, adds auth, or just blocks the traffic pattern from a nightly cron. that's the kind of upstream dependency that can silently break a whole API on someone else's schedule, not yours. is there a fallback data source or is Algolia the single point of failure for the YC side
ExploreYC
@galdayan plan is to have a fleet of contributors and ai agents that will figure the problem once it's present :D jokes aside, web crawling has been a thing for decades now, so there're multiple ways to overcome almost anything
@konstantimb haha fair, the joke aside is doing some work there but I get the point, it's not really a novel fragile-scraper problem, more a maintained-scraper problem, and you're clearly already living with it day to day. good luck with the launch
Prefactor
Is it free?
ExploreYC
@ethan_lee8 open source == free
Voquill
Congrats on the launch! Looks really useful and a nice addition to the original launch.
One thing I'd want to know is how often the data is refreshed and how quickly funding or hiring updates make it into the API.
ExploreYC
@henry_habib data is pulled daily as YC generally pushed data daily
Voquill
@konstantimb nice!
Foyer
The YC data angle is interesting mostly because the quality of that data degrades fast. Batch, status, current founders, whether a company is still operating or quietly dead. Curious how ExploreYC handles staleness, specifically whether you're pulling from a live source or maintaining a snapshot, and how often that snapshot gets refreshed. Also wondering how the a16z side works since their portfolio data is a lot less structured than YC's directory.
ExploreYC
@fberrez1 pulling from the most alive source possible for YC - directly form the website, every day, so data is fresh. the initial poll got us to 5.4k companies or around that, you can even see the images from previous launch, so now as you can see on landing page it sits at over 6k! that gradually got to this point day over day
BetterClaw
Congrats on the launch! 👏
Love the idea of making YC data much more searchable and actionable.
Curious.....what's been the most unexpected way early users are using ExploreYC?
ExploreYC
@worksforme very happy you like it!!
Spent way too long doing this manually with YC's directory and a bunch
of half-remembered LinkedIn searches. Having search, funding data, and
hiring boards actually talk to each other in one place is such an
obvious upgrade once you see it.
The API-first cut of this is the version I'd actually reach for, @konstantimb . Non-expiring key in 30 seconds, standard X-RateLimit-* + Retry-After headers, and interactive Swagger — that's the boring DX most data APIs skip, and it's exactly what makes one safe to wire into a pipeline.
Open-sourcing the whole ingestion side on top of that is a real trust signal when the dataset leans on scraped sources. Great comeback launch 👌
ExploreYC
@konstantimb Nice — putting agentic search front and center fits how people actually validate an idea: start broad, narrow fast. Curious whether that vector search is exposed on the API too, not just the UI — an idea-validation endpoint an agent can hit ("is this space already crowded?") feels like the natural next surface for it, and ties right back to the API-DX angle.
I come from the investing side, where structured data on private companies usually sits behind expensive paywalls, so open-sourcing this is a real gift. How fresh is the data, and what's the source when a company hasn't announced anything publicly?
ExploreYC
@henry_s_jung the data is freshly polled every single day man!