Guide · Updated June 2026

How to find YC companies

The official, complete, free list of every Y Combinator company is at ycombinator.com/companies. It covers every batch from 2005 to today — over 5,000 companies — and you can filter by batch, industry, region, team size, and whether the company is still active. This guide walks through what's in the official directory, what it doesn't include, and when you need a structured dataset instead.

The official source: ycombinator.com/companies

Y Combinator publishes a public directory at ycombinator.com/companies that lists every company they've ever funded. It's the authoritative source — if it's not there, it didn't go through YC. The directory supports filtering by:

• Batch (Summer 2005 through the current batch)
• Industry (Fintech, AI, B2B SaaS, Healthcare, etc.)
• Region (US, Europe, India, etc.)
• Status (Active, Acquired, Public, Inactive)
• Tags like "Hiring", "Top Companies", or specific tech stacks
• Team size

For each company you get a name, one-line description, batch code (e.g. W26), website link, location, team size, and — for most — founder names with short bios and often a LinkedIn link. There is no API, but the page is server-rendered enough to be scrape-friendly if you need bulk access.

What the official directory does not include

The YC directory is built for discovery, not outreach. Specifically, it does not give you:

• Founder email addresses. You'd need to find them yourself (email-finder tools, manual digging, or pattern-guessing against the company domain).
• Founder LinkedIn URLs in a structured way. Some founders link from their bio; many don't.
• "Still at the company?" status. Founders who've left aren't flagged. The directory shows who founded the company, not who currently works there.
• A downloadable CSV. You can copy from the page, but there's no export.
• Historical batches as a single export. You browse one batch at a time.

For most people just wanting to know what YC has funded, none of this matters and the free directory is perfect. If you're building a CRM list, running cold outreach, or doing recruiting, you usually need at least three of the above.

Alternative sources, by what you actually need

If you need a single company's founders + bios

Start at the company's page on ycombinator.com/companies. Then cross-reference with LinkedIn (search "founder at [company]") and the company's own About page. For storied YC companies (Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Reddit, Doordash), Wikipedia and Crunchbase have rich histories.

If you need all companies from a recent batch

Filter the directory by batch (e.g. W26). For a copy you can work with offline, browse our per-batch company directories — free, no signup, structured tables:

If you need to compare batches or analyze trends

Our year overview pages aggregate batch-level stats: YC 2026, YC 2025, YC 2024. For older batches and full historical analysis, Crunchbase and PitchBook have YC-tagged datasets, though access is usually paid.

If you need founder email addresses in bulk

This is what we built this site for. The DIY path: scrape ycombinator.com/companies, scrape each company page for founder names, find verified emails per company domain, cross-check LinkedIn for current employment, structure into a CSV. It's doable — that's exactly the pipeline behind our datasets — but most people would rather buy 1,873 verified contacts as a CSV than spend a weekend on it.

Finding YC founders by batch and city

A common combined filter — say, "YC founders in San Francisco from a specific batch" — isn't a one-click thing on the official directory. Here's how to assemble it:

1. Start with the batch. On ycombinator.com/companies, filter by batch (e.g. W26). Apply the "Region" filter for a coarse cut (e.g. "United States").
2. Narrow to city. The directory's region filter doesn't go to city level. Click into each company to see its location, or scrape the page to filter offline. For active YC companies, San Francisco / SF Bay Area is by far the most common — often 50–70% of a batch.
3. Cross-check founders' current location. A company being "in San Francisco" doesn't mean every founder lives there. Check each founder's LinkedIn for their current city. Founders move; YC's company location and the founder's location can drift apart.
4. Or skip the assembly. Our datasets ship with per-founder city / state / country fields. Filter the CSV by batch and city in seconds rather than reassembling the data per query. Each batch's company list is also browsable here — e.g. W26 companies, F25 companies.

The same workflow applies to other cities (New York, London, Bangalore, Berlin, Singapore) and other batch slices — just swap the filters.

When a pre-built founder dataset makes sense

A dataset like the ones on this site is the right call when:

• You're running cold outreach (sales, recruiting, partnerships, investor scout).
• You need to import contacts into a CRM, sequencer, or LinkedIn outreach tool.
• You care that the data is verified (deliverable email, active at company) rather than scraped-and-hopeful.
• You want consistent updates after each new YC batch without rebuilding your scraper.
• Your time is worth more than $21 per batch.

It's the wrong call if you just want to read about YC companies (use the official directory — it's free and complete), if you need pre-2024 data (we focus on recent batches), or if you're building a research project where you specifically want to do the scrape yourself.

Frequently asked questions

Summary

To find YC companies, start at ycombinator.com/companies. It's the official, complete, free directory and it's the right tool for almost all discovery use cases. If you need founder emails, LinkedIn URLs, or "still-at-the-company?" verification in a CSV — for sales, recruiting, partnerships, or cold outreach — that's not what YC's directory is built for, and you'll either need to assemble the dataset yourself or use one that already exists. We maintain 13 offerings across 10 batches; browse them on the homepage.