ExploreYC: free open-source data layer over 5,773 Y Combinator companies across 20 years — searchable map, hiring and funding signals, AI-powered company intelligence

Built solo by Konstantin Borimechkov on Claude, OpenAI and Vercel, launched at #6 of the day on Product Hunt with 159 upvotes. The product turns the YC company directory — which exists on ycombinator.com as a barely-filterable list — into a proper queryable dataset with interactive maps, batch analytics, and AI-generated context per company. The author has also opened the codebase for contributors, which puts the project in a different bucket from the paid YC-data dashboards on the market.

Three concrete uses for an early-stage team. Market validation: pull every YC company that touched your space in the last decade, see which ones survived, which pivoted, which got acquired, and read the pattern in 10 minutes instead of 10 hours of crunchbase tabs. Hiring scouting: surface ex-YC operators by company, batch and role — useful when you need a head of growth or first PM and want to filter for the YC operator school. Fundraising prep: see which YC alumni in your space have actively been raising, by what stage, from which investors — context that shapes who to warm-intro through.

The honest read: the "data over YC" angle is not new — Latka, Crunchbase Lists, and three different Bubble apps have tried this. The difference is that ExploreYC is free, open-source, and built around batch analytics rather than per-company lookup, which is the right primitive for founders doing research versus salespeople doing prospecting. Whether the AI-intelligence layer is useful or pure pattern-matching dressed up — that depends on what questions you put to it.

Batch analytics over a curated startup cohort is a quietly underrated tool. Most operators get useful pattern recognition from looking at 100 companies side by side, not from reading any single profile in depth — and the public YC list is, against the odds, one of the best curated datasets in the startup world for exactly that.

https://exploreyc.com/