Y Combinator Companies API Scraper

What this Actor scrapes

Y Combinator publishes every funded company at ycombinator.com/companies. The directory is backed by a public Algolia search index — the same one the website uses to power its filter UI. This Actor queries that index directly so you can pull the full yc companies database by free-text query, batch (e.g. W24, S23), industry tag, or status — and receive one clean dataset row per company.

No official API, no CSV download, and no bulk export exists from YC. That gap is exactly what this Actor fills.

What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so the target sees a genuine browser, not a Python script.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block or rate-limit response.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After header honoured.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when the target pushes back, we slow down and surface a clear status message instead of returning an empty dataset.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge (beyond the small warm-up fee).

Use cases

• Lead gen — pull every W24 Developer Tools company with website, team size, and one-liner, then enrich downstream in Clay or Apollo.
• Investor prospecting — surface YC companies in a given vertical sorted by team size to prioritise outreach.
• Hiring — track active YC companies in your city or tech stack.
• Competitive intel — schedule a weekly run, diff against last week, and catch newly-added companies the day they appear.
• Sales ops — pipe filtered YC company lists straight into HubSpot, Attio, or Smartlead as a live lead source.
• Research — build a quarterly batch report (YC W24: companies by industry, location, team size) without hand-copying rows from the directory.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "batch": "W24",
  "maxResults": 3,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

slugnameone_linerlong_descriptionbatchstatusindustriestagsregionslocationteam_sizewebsitesmall_logo_urlyc_urlyc_team_linkscraped_at

{
  "slug": "example-startup",
  "name": "Example",
  "one_liner": "AI-powered example builder.",
  "batch": "W24",
  "status": "Active",
  "industries": [
    "B2B",
    "Developer Tools"
  ],
  "regions": [
    "United States",
    "San Francisco"
  ],
  "team_size": 4,
  "website": "https://example.com",
  "yc_url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/example-startup",
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-01T12:00:00Z"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Algolia search ranks results — the order reflects YC's internal relevance scoring, not alphabetical or chronological.
• Founder names, bios, and full team rosters live on individual profile pages, not in the directory index. Use a follow-up Actor to fetch individual profiles if needed.
• Revenue figures, funding amounts, and valuation data are not published in the YC directory and are not in scope.
• YC occasionally refreshes its Algolia configuration. We run weekly cloud QA; if the index changes we ship a fix within 24 hours.