Pull up every company in a Y Combinator batch, slice it by industry, region, status or hiring, and read the profiles that stand out. Turn the Firecrawl connector on, and Claude will search Y Combinator companies by batch with Firecrawl Alexandria, which reads the public Y Combinator startup directory as it stands today.
Best for
- Investors and scouts sizing up a freshly published YC batch, sector by sector.
- Founders and job seekers looking for batch companies with open roles today.
- Sales and partnership teams assembling recent YC startups in a particular market or region.
Connector and data providers
Connector: the Firecrawl connector. Lets Claude query YC's directory through Firecrawl Alexandria, with each lookup charged to your Firecrawl team.
Data providers in Firecrawl Alexandria
| Provider | Tool | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Y Combinator | Batches | Each batch label YC uses and its number of companies, starting with the latest. |
| Y Combinator | Search | Matches on exact batch, industry, region, tag or status (Active, Acquired, Public, Inactive), with switches for hiring, Top Companies and nonprofits plus optional keywords. Pages hold 20 companies, each with its one-liner, industry, tags, headcount, location, stage and site. |
| Y Combinator | Company | A full profile: long description, founding year, headcount, location, status, and each listed founder's title and bio. |
| Y Combinator | Jobs | Roles posted on a company profile, with location, remote or in-office, skills, visa notes, and pay or equity wording when given. |
Explore Firecrawl Alexandria data providers across categories
Starter prompt
Swap in the batch and industry you care about, then paste:
Use Firecrawl to search Y Combinator's company directory in Firecrawl
Alexandria. List the YC batches first so you have the exact label, then
search the Summer 2026 batch for Fintech companies. Tell me each tool's
cost before you run it.
Report back with:
- The number of Summer 2026 Fintech companies.
- A table of name, one-liner, location, team size and hiring status.
- Open roles and any salary text for up to three of the hiring ones.
Stick to what the directory returns, and leave blank fields blank.Before you start
- Authorize Firecrawl. From the Firecrawl connector page, click Connect. Firecrawl loads in your browser so you can sign in (or make a free account), select a team and approve. More on the setup lives at Firecrawl in Claude.
- Flip the toggle. In a conversation, the + button leads to Connectors, where Firecrawl can be turned on. You won't need an API key, and credits come from your team.
- Write batch names in full. YC's directory uses season and year, like Spring 2026, so if all you have is a short code, ask Claude to pull the batch list before searching.
Limitations of using Claude to search YC companies by batch
A new batch lands every quarter, and YC's list only appears once a browser runs the page's scripts. Five problems follow for Claude.
- The newest cohort is past the cutoff. Anthropic's help center says Claude models have knowledge cutoffs and may be unaware of later events (Anthropic). On Oct 9, 2026, YC already listed 123 companies under Fall 2026, which a model trained earlier can't know about.
- Twice-a-year thinking is out of date. YC added Spring and Fall to Winter and Summer, with Spring 2025 as the first spring cohort (Y Combinator). If Claude assumes two batches a year, it can skip half of them.
- Static fetches come back empty. Our plain-HTML request to the YC directory returned little more than a title, since the list is built in the browser by scripts (Y Combinator). Anything that reads raw page text sees no companies.
- A batch says nothing about today. The label marks the cohort, and companies get acquired or shut down afterward. WorkLife carries both a Winter 2015 label and an Acquired status (Y Combinator).
- Patched-together lists drift. Anthropic says Claude can occasionally be incorrect or misleading, that its answers are only as good as the sources behind them, and that it shouldn't be the only place you check (Anthropic). A batch list rebuilt from press coverage can slip in startups from other cohorts.
How it works
Claude puts a batch answer together from:
- Firecrawl Alexandria: the layer Firecrawl built to give agents real data instead of guesses. Over 100 official providers are in it under paid licenses, with public sources such as YC's directory and Firecrawl's indexes of the web, research, code docs and government records. Firecrawl benchmarked it on 845 tasks, holding model and prompts steady and grading blind with an AI judge, and agents with Firecrawl Alexandria posted answer-quality scores 21% higher than agents relying on built-in web tools.
- Labels taken literally: search filters on batch, industry, region and tag in YC's exact wording, which is why Claude fetches the batch list and filters on "Summer 2026" rather than an abbreviation like "S26".
- Every page fetched: the directory serves 20 results per page, and Claude keeps going until it reports the end, stopping at 50 pages for any one filter set.
- Look, don't touch: Claude confirms inputs and cost before each call, and these tools only read YC's public directory. Nothing gets applied for or sent.
Searching YC companies by batch in Claude with and without Firecrawl Alexandria
| Claude using recall and web search | Claude using YC's directory | |
|---|---|---|
| Origin of the list | Training data, press pieces and launch roundups | The live YC startup directory |
| Most recent batch | Often incomplete or missing | Shows up once YC publishes its companies |
| Batch spelling | From memory, possibly off | Exact directory labels, each with a company count |
| Ways to narrow | Whatever articles happened to say | Filters for batch, industry, region, status and tag, or by the hiring, Top Companies and nonprofit markers |
| Knowing it's complete | No total to check against | A full count, with pages fetched until none remain |
| Who's hiring | Outdated postings | YC's hiring flag and live roles per company |
| Source | Hard to pin down | YC's own directory through Firecrawl Alexandria, a catalog that also offers 100+ official providers in business, markets, media and the public sector. Explore the catalog |
Build a YC batch search for your goal
Let the use shape the request. If you're an investor scouting a batch:
With Firecrawl, search the Fall 2026 YC batch and page through all of it.
Group the companies by industry with a count per group, and list the B2B
ones with their one-liner, tags and team size.If you're job hunting at an early YC startup:
Use Firecrawl to find Summer 2026 YC companies tagged AI that the
directory shows as hiring. List each one's open roles with location,
remote or onsite, and any salary or equity text.Spelling out the batch and the fields you want tells Claude exactly which filters to use and when to stop paging.
Take it further
Narrow to a region
Use Firecrawl to list YC Spring 2026 companies in the Europe region with
city, one-liner and industry.See who was acquired
With Firecrawl, which Summer 2025 YC companies does the directory now mark
as Acquired? Include each one-liner.A theme within a batch
Use Firecrawl to search the Winter 2026 YC batch for "voice agents" and
keep only the companies whose one-liner is actually about voice.Meet the founders
With Firecrawl, open Pennant's YC profile and give me its batch, founding
year, team size and the founders listed with their titles.Check prices first
Use Firecrawl to list the Y Combinator tools in Firecrawl Alexandria and
what each costs per call.What it costs
You can look up any tool and its price for free. Each tool run takes credits from your Firecrawl team, and the plans are on Firecrawl pricing.
| Y Combinator tool | Gives you | Credits per call |
|---|---|---|
| Batches | Batch labels and how many companies each has | 5 |
| Search | Up to 20 companies that fit your filters | 5 |
| Company | A single profile with its founders | 5 |
| Jobs | The roles one company has open | 5 |
A whole batch works out to 5 credits for each page of 20, and Claude spells out every tool call and its cost.
[ YC batch search in Claude ]
Connect Firecrawl and ask Claude who made it into the newest YC batch. Looking up tools and prices is free.
Related use cases
- How to find startups that just raised money in Claude: use Fireround to see which batch companies raised once Demo Day was over.
- How to generate B2B leads in Claude: turn batch companies into named contacts with Apollo and FullEnrich.
- Fireround: round sizes and investors for startups you spot in a batch.
Coverage limits
- Limited to YC's own data. Status, hiring and headcount are whatever YC shows, search results have no funding figures, and founder details live only on individual profiles.
- Future cohorts are nearly empty. Batches that haven't begun may list only a few companies; Winter 2027 had three on Oct 9, 2026.
- Keyword search is loose. Free text matches broadly across names and descriptions and can pull in unrelated startups, so lean on exact label filters.