Get YC Founders Data (+ Funding $) through an API
hey guys,
today we shipped Founder Leaderboards on ExploreYC: ~3,000 YC founders (and growing), deduped across every company they've started, ranked four ways:
💰 Most Funded · 🦄 Unicorn Founders · 🚀 Biggest Exits · 🔁 Serial Founders
some of it's who you'd expect - the Collison brothers and the Airbnb crew up top. Some of it's a rabbit hole: the same names keep resurfacing across batches. Kyle Vogt (Twitch → Cruise), Justin Kan, and Parker Conrad have each done YC more than once, and 160+ founders here are behind billion-dollar companies.
and since we're an open-data project, the whole thing is also a free API:
GET/ https://api.exploreyc.com/api/v1/founders?metric=funded 🧑💻
what do you think of this? will it be useful for you, would you like to see it extended to more founders?
Replies
Curious about your data freshness since funding numbers go stale fast. Are you recrawling on a schedule or event-driven?
I like that it's focused on founders instead of just companies. It tells a much more interesting story. Do you have plans to expand beyond YC into other accelerator ecosystems?
ExploreYC
Curious about the funding numbers are they pulled from a single source or merged from multiple datasets? Keeping them accurate must be a challenge.
I can already imagine developers building dashboards and analytics with this API. Have you noticed any unexpected use cases since launching?
Dial
the "unicorn founders" ranking is the one I'd want to poke at - unicorn status is a snapshot of a last-known valuation, not a live number, and plenty of those marks are stale (down rounds, write-downs, whatever). is the leaderboard pulling a point-in-time valuation and freezing it, or do you revisit and adjust when a company's valuation actually moves?
ExploreYC
Dial
@konstantimb haha fair. mostly asking because I've seen a few "unicorn" badges outlive the valuation that earned them by a couple years - not a dig at your project, just curious if that's a manual refresh problem or something you'd automate eventually
This is a fun rabbit hole the repeat-founder pattern (Vogt, Kan, Conrad) is the interesting part, way more than the leaderboard itself. Would love to see it sliced by 'founders who've had one exit vs multiple' curious if second-time success rate actually holds up or if it's mostly first-timers who happened to nail it once.
ExploreYC
@taskrelayhq you can raise a PR via claude on the proejct to make this filter/change to it!
Dial
the serial-founder angle is the more interesting leaderboard to me than most-funded, funding totals mostly just reflect stage and category, but doing YC more than once says something about the person specifically. would be curious if the API also exposes which of a founder's companies is which attempt (1st, 2nd, 3rd time) rather than just the count
The dedup-across-name-variations problem is one I didn't expect to relate to, but I run into a version of it constantly on the monitoring side: the same real-world event showing up as slightly different signals across three different businesses, and figuring out whether it's actually one thing or three. Merging noisy real-world data without losing the interesting edge cases (like your repeat-founder rabbit holes) is genuinely hard. Nice that you're keeping it open rather than gating it, that's usually what makes a dataset like this actually get used instead of just admired.