Get YC Founders Data (+ Funding $) through an API
hey guys,
today we shipped Founder Leaderboards on ExploreYC: ~3,000 YC founders (and growing), deduped across every company they've started, ranked four ways:
💰 Most Funded · 🦄 Unicorn Founders · 🚀 Biggest Exits · 🔁 Serial Founders
some of it's who you'd expect - the Collison brothers and the Airbnb crew up top. Some of it's a rabbit hole: the same names keep resurfacing across batches. Kyle Vogt (Twitch → Cruise), Justin Kan, and Parker Conrad have each done YC more than once, and 160+ founders here are behind billion-dollar companies.
and since we're an open-data project, the whole thing is also a free API:
GET/ https://api.exploreyc.com/api/v1/founders?metric=funded 🧑💻
what do you think of this? will it be useful for you, would you like to see it extended to more founders?
Replies
Curious about your data freshness since funding numbers go stale fast. Are you recrawling on a schedule or event-driven?
I like that it's focused on founders instead of just companies. It tells a much more interesting story. Do you have plans to expand beyond YC into other accelerator ecosystems?
ExploreYC
This scratches an itch I've had for a while. Have you considered exposing founder relationships too? Seeing repeat co-founder combinations across YC would be fascinating to explore.
Curious about the funding numbers are they pulled from a single source or merged from multiple datasets? Keeping them accurate must be a challenge.
Love seeing open data projects like this. What's next on your roadmap employee data, investor networks, or deeper company metrics? Curious where you're taking ExploreYC.
I can already imagine developers building dashboards and analytics with this API. Have you noticed any unexpected use cases since launching?
the "unicorn founders" ranking is the one I'd want to poke at - unicorn status is a snapshot of a last-known valuation, not a live number, and plenty of those marks are stale (down rounds, write-downs, whatever). is the leaderboard pulling a point-in-time valuation and freezing it, or do you revisit and adjust when a company's valuation actually moves?
ExploreYC
@konstantimb haha fair. mostly asking because I've seen a few "unicorn" badges outlive the valuation that earned them by a couple years - not a dig at your project, just curious if that's a manual refresh problem or something you'd automate eventually
This is a fun rabbit hole the repeat-founder pattern (Vogt, Kan, Conrad) is the interesting part, way more than the leaderboard itself. Would love to see it sliced by 'founders who've had one exit vs multiple' curious if second-time success rate actually holds up or if it's mostly first-timers who happened to nail it once.
ExploreYC
@taskrelayhq you can raise a PR via claude on the proejct to make this filter/change to it!
the serial-founder angle is the more interesting leaderboard to me than most-funded, funding totals mostly just reflect stage and category, but doing YC more than once says something about the person specifically. would be curious if the API also exposes which of a founder's companies is which attempt (1st, 2nd, 3rd time) rather than just the count