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
The dedup-across-name-variations problem is one I didn't expect to relate to, but I run into a version of it constantly on the monitoring side: the same real-world event showing up as slightly different signals across three different businesses, and figuring out whether it's actually one thing or three. Merging noisy real-world data without losing the interesting edge cases (like your repeat-founder rabbit holes) is genuinely hard. Nice that you're keeping it open rather than gating it, that's usually what makes a dataset like this actually get used instead of just admired.