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
This is much cleaner than most YC datasets I have come across. How long did the deduplication process actually take?
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?
One suggestion it would be cool to compare founders by batch and industry side by side. that could reveal some really intersting trends over time.
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!
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