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.
This is the 2nd launch from ExploreYC . View more
ExploreYC
Launched this week
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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Launch Team
This is actually useful for pre-launch validation before building anything you can search your category, see which batches funded similar ideas, check if those companies are still alive ,and figure out where the graveyard is. Has anyone used it that way to kill an idea before wasting six months on it?
ExploreYC
@jasnoor_singh_oberoi idk, haven't gone out and ask people, but the platform got ton of attraction and i see people constantly running the idea vaildator
the api layer is the right play. everyone building founder-facing tools rebuilds this dataset every time and it's silly.
real q: does exploreyc distinguish "raised $X" from "shipped something users pay for"? because those have drifted a mile apart and the data layer that solves the second one eats the first.
ExploreYC
@thenameisarian you can make the distinguish by adding your touch to the code with Claude 👀 https://github.com/KonstantinMB/exploreyc
The hiring insights and batch analytics stand out since most YC directories focus on basic company search. How often is the underlying data refreshed, and do you surface historical changes so users can spot trends over time rather than just a snapshot?
ExploreYC
Congrats on the second launch. Merging both portfolios into one schema sounds like the unglamorous hard part — YC has batches and a public directory, a16z is scattered across press pages. Which fields refused to line up between the two?
ExploreYC
@vollos yea, merging even more portfolios will be hard. still investigating how can the platform scale and how it should change. open for suggestions
@konstantimb If it were mine I'd probably keep the shared core tiny and let each source keep its own raw fields, jsonb or similar, instead of forcing everything to line up. No idea if that survives contact with your actual data though. Good luck with the scale question.
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.
Would love a heatmap of YC batches by problem space over time e.g. how many fintech vs. dev-tool vs. climate companies per batch. Founders could instantly see which spaces are getting crowded vs. underexplored before pitching a similar idea.
ExploreYC
The open-source plan mentioned in the comments is the interesting part to me is that just the app layer, or the enriched dataset too? Curious how you're thinking about keeping funding/hiring data in sync once other people are touching the codebase.