ExploreYC

hey PH - we're back! 👋 I'm Konstantin. We first launched ExploreYC - here as a web app for exploring Y Combinator's portfolio, and the response was awesome — thank you 🙏. Ever since, the #1 request has been the same one thing: "Can I get the data through an API?" So this launch is exactly that. This is ExploreYC's open-source + API edition - the same cleaned, enriched dataset, now something you can query, script, and build on. And it grew up: it now covers a16z's portfolio alongside YC. 👉 New here? Welcome. Caught our first launch? This is the developer edition you asked for. 🎉 ✨ What's new since our first launch: - A public REST API - YC + a16z, filter by VC (`source=yc | a16z | all`) - The entire project is now **open source** - Developer accounts, API keys, rate limits, docs & a usage dashboard - a16z portfolio data (exits, acquirers, founders, tickers) sitting next to YC 🔌 The API (the star of this launch): - One base URL, JSON over HTTPS: `https://api.exploreyc.com/api/v1` - Filter by VC - `source=yc | a16z | all` — plus batch, industry, country, hiring status, or full-text search - Company detail by id or slug: funding, stage, **IPO/M&A exits**, acquirer, founders, ticker - Portfolio stats, sources, geo/map data, and batch "Wrapped" analytics - Get an API key in 30 seconds - non-expiring, with per-key rate limits (`X-RateLimit-*` headers, `Retry-After`) - A full docs site with copy-paste curl / Node / Python examples + interactive Swagger - A developer dashboard to manage keys, watch your usage (7-day charts + top endpoints), and set a profile ```bash curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \ "https://api.exploreyc.com/api/v1..." ``` 🌐 And the whole thing is open source → github.com/KonstantinMB/exploreyc 🎯 Why: researching startups means jumping between YC's directory, a16z's site, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and 20 browser tabs. I cleaned + enriched all of it into one dataset — and now anyone can build on it. 🧰 Everything the API powers is also a polished web app: 🔍 Search & filter 6,800+ YC + a16z companies 🗺️ Interactive global map 🤖 AI company research 📊 Analytics + funding data 💼 Live hiring board (1,400+ companies hiring) 💡 Startup idea validator 🎁 Batch "Wrapped" shareables Would love your feedback - especially from anyone building tools for founders, investors, or the startup ecosystem. What would you build with this API? Show more

@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?

@konstantimb Nice, this has been long over due! Congrats on the launch!

@konstantimb Thanks so much! BTW, to be clear, the videois unclaimed; upload to any youtube channel and you will not have a copyright probel; it is your's. Hope you can use it in your launch page. Ad for foxplug, Opus 4.8 tells me that in the "share your work" space, for tools that ingest github, vercel, supabase, gitlab, okay, so we do all those and also startup funding platforms... we are unrivalled. Add to it that you either use our tool to generate launch videos, GIFs, sticker collections (e.g. to get syndicated exposure through how these are ingested and shared in Slack, DIscord, Meta, LinkedIn, MS Teams and so on... and the autogeneration of your feature releases, it's truly the tool that let's me JUST SHIP. The social, the citation-grade longform articles - I just get, post, back to work. Eager to get your feedback - and take care of your wishlist, once you get in there. Thanks again, Kostantin!

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

@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

@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

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.

Congrats on the launch! Looks really useful and a nice addition to the original launch. One thing I'd want to know is how often the data is refreshed and how quickly funding or hiring updates make it into the API.

Love seeing you turn the original web app into an API after listening to users. Curious, how do you handle entity resolution when the same company appears differently across YC and a16z datasets?

@konstantimb link gives 404

@saulfleischman thank you, looks dope! looking forward to see your product grow, I really need it in upcoming launches

@henry_habib data is pulled daily as YC generally pushed data daily

But this isn't authorized by YC, and you didn't license the right to use "YC" in the product name, did you?

@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

@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

you can add or change whatever you want, it is open sourced! thank you for the deep review man, really helpful <3

@rnagulapalle cause the swagger docs link is: https://api.exploreyc.com/api/v1/docs and the docs themselves are on: https://www.exploreyc.com/api-docs.. there is no /api/v1

@luki_notlowkey manually atm. don't have a flow for it, but it would be simple enough - database can enforce a constraint or once we detect a conflict, we can do some merger of the data, to add in missing pieces from the two platforms. this doesn't happen like almost at all atm with these two sources

@konstantimb nice!

@chrismessina it is not, yes. Reached out to YC before but no response Either way I am fan of YC as you can see and if they come and want the software - I’m all in to give it to them. Also I don’t plan to monetize the producr