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
Launching today
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
ExploreYC
RiteKit Company Logo API
@konstantimb The "20 browser tabs to research startups" pain is exactly right, and turning YC + a16z into one open-source dataset with an API is the version people actually build on. "Get a key and query in 30 seconds" is the part that'll win developers, and open-sourcing it is a strong trust signal.
An API launch is hard to show in screenshots, so a short demo helps a lot, and you launched without one — so I made you one, free and whitelabel, no strings:
https://foxplug.com/v/ss-exploreyc-launch-the-data-la-70acc8c9
Yours to keep: download it from that page, upload it to your own YouTube so it's yours, then add it to your PH media — and reuse it on any other launch site. Launches with a video do better, and yours is still editable.
Made at https://foxplug.com/?utm_source=producthunt&utm_medium=comment — you can make more there, or record your own product tour in ~2 minutes. Anyone else launching soon: paste your site, video in about 30 seconds. Great comeback launch, Konstantin.
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
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
Merging YC and a16z into one dataset, the part I'd want documented before building on it is entity resolution. Last time I stitched company data across two sources, matching 'same company, different record' ate most of the effort: OpenAI vs OpenAI Inc vs matching on domain, then deciding which source wins when the funding stage disagrees. Do you expose a stable canonical company ID across both, and when YC and a16z conflict on a field, is there a documented precedence?
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!!
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!