Y Combinator Companies Scraper

Y Combinator Companies Scraper: search the YC startup directory by batch, industry or tag

Pick a batch like W24, an industry, a region, a tag or a status, or paste company profile URLs. You get one row per company: the pitch, the long description, batch, status, team size, founded year, location, website, tags and the founders with their LinkedIn and X links.

The awkward bit is the founded year. It comes off the company's own profile page, and a fair number of profiles simply do not carry one, so yearFounded arrives null rather than estimated.

🏢 What Y Combinator Companies Scraper does

The YC directory is a searchable index of every company that has been through the programme, and each company also has its own profile page. This reads both and joins them into one row.

The directory card gives you the name, one-liner, batch, status, team size, industries, regions, tags, logo and website. The profile page adds the founders with their titles and bios, the year the company was founded, the city and country, and links to LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Crunchbase and GitHub. Every row has the same keys whichever way you searched.

Filters combine the way you would expect. Values inside one list are OR'd together, and different lists narrow each other. Ask for W24 and S23 with industries: ["B2B"] and you get B2B companies from either batch.

📥 What you give it

Every field is optional. Run it with the input empty and you get one labelled sample row back.

{
  "batches": ["W24", "S23"],
  "industries": ["B2B"],
  "statuses": ["Active"],
  "maxItems": 200
}

isHiring has three states, not two. Leave it out and no hiring filter is applied. Set it true and you get companies flagged as hiring. Set it to false and you get only the companies that are not hiring, which is a legitimate query and almost never what somebody means. The Console writes a literal false into the input once you have ticked the box and unticked it again, so if a run comes back full of companies that are not hiring, remove the field rather than unticking it.

📤 What you get back

A real row, from run NctVtHlEJQFnIqU35:

{
  "ok": true, "charged": true, "recordType": "company", "query": "Winter 2024",
  "name": "Indemni", "slug": "indemni",
  "oneLiner": "Cargo Theft and Fraud Prevention Platform",
  "longDescription": "We are building a safer supply chain. Cargo Theft has been increasing yearly, ...",
  "batch": "Winter 2024", "batchCode": "W24", "status": "Active",
  "teamSize": 7, "yearFounded": 2024,
  "location": "San Francisco, CA, USA", "city": "San Francisco", "country": "US",
  "regions": ["United States of America", "America / Canada", "Remote", "Partly Remote"],
  "website": "http://www.indemni.com",
  "ycProfileUrl": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/indemni",
  "industry": "B2B", "industries": ["B2B", "Supply Chain and Logistics"],
  "subindustry": "B2B -> Supply Chain and Logistics",
  "tags": ["Identity", "Logistics", "Supply Chain", "Fraud Prevention", "Fraud Detection"],
  "founders": [
    { "name": "Omar Draz", "title": "Founder",
      "linkedinUrl": "https://linkedin.com/in/odraz",
      "twitterUrl": "https://twitter.com/oamdraz",
      "bio": "Ex-DoorDash, worked on Fraud, Growth and Logistics. Currently building!" }
  ],
  "founderNames": "Omar Draz", "founderCount": 1,
  "linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/100487698/admin",
  "twitterUrl": null, "facebookUrl": null, "crunchbaseUrl": null, "githubUrl": null,
  "logoUrl": "https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/a4f88ce8a0...png",
  "formerNames": ["Alacrity"],
  "isHiring": false, "nonprofit": false, "topCompany": false, "stage": "Early",
  "launchedAt": "2024-02-15T20:40:36.000Z", "companyId": "29533",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-21T01:52:29.035Z"
}

longDescription and logoUrl are cut short above. A real row carries both in full.

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row.

charged is set when the row is built, a moment before the charge goes out, so read it as "this is a real row" rather than as a receipt. A failed charge adds a CHARGE_ERROR diagnostic at the end.

The Console's default table hides the diagnostic columns, so those rows look blank there. Read them from the JSON.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Y Combinator Companies Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Put batches in Batches, or terms in Search terms, or slugs in Company profile URLs. 3. Narrow it with Industries, Regions, Tags or Company status if you want. 4. Set Maximum companies, keeping it low on the first run. 5. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.90 per 1,000 companies. The same rate on every Apify plan, with no volume tiers.

One charge per company row. The same company returned by two of your filters is only charged once. Sample rows and diagnostic rows are never charged, and neither are companies a stage filter leaves out. Reading each company's profile page for the founders does not change the rate: it is the same per company with includeFounders on or off.

💡 What people use it for

• Pulling a whole batch the week it is announced, for a newsletter or a tracker.
• Building a founder outreach list, since founders carries LinkedIn and X links directly.
• Filtering the directory for a thesis: a region, an industry and Active status together.
• Checking which YC companies in a space are hiring, then pairing it with a jobs scraper.
• Refreshing a stale list, using formerNames to catch companies that renamed.

🚧 What it does not do

• Companies only. No YC jobs, no Launch YC posts, no news, no funding rounds.
• No founder emails, and no contact details of any kind. Names and social links are what the

directory publishes.

• yearFounded, city, country and the social links come from the profile page, so they are

null when includeFounders is off.

• A profile page that fails to load still ships its row, and still bills, with founders empty

and those profile-only fields null. Nothing on the row separates "could not read" from "not published", so re-run any slug that comes back suspiciously bare.

• One filter with no batches tops out at 1,000 matches, because that is as far as the

directory's own search will page. Split the request by batch to get past it.

• 60 values per filter list, 500 URLs, 7,000 rows in a run. Anything past that is dropped.
• Team size and status are whatever the directory says today. They are not audited and they go

stale when a company does not update its own record.

🧭 Which company scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a YC login or an API key? No. Nothing to paste in and nothing to renew.

How do I get one whole batch? Put the batch code in batches and set maxItems above the batch size. A recent batch runs to a few hundred companies.

Can I get the entire directory? Tick allCompanies and raise maxItems. It walks batch by batch, newest first, and you pay per company, so decide the number before you start it.

Why did one filter stop at 1,000? Because the directory's search pages that far and no further. Add batches and the run splits the query per batch, which gets around it.

What is query for? It names the batch, term or filter each row came from, which is the only way to attribute results when you ran several searches in one go.

Is this legal? The directory and the profile pages are public. Rows carry founders' names and links, which data-protection law covers, so have a reason for collecting them. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a fair start, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the run ID and the input you used. A diagnostic row's errorCode and the query field on it usually point straight at the filter that went wrong.