Every Y Combinator company in one dataset.

A full census of 5,909 launched YC companies — every batch from Summer 2005 to Winter 2027 — with batch, status, sector, geography, and AI/fintech/healthcare/devtools/climate flags. Plus hand-verified IPOs, large acquisitions, and post-YC funding rounds with citations.

Companies

5,909

all batches in YC directory

Active

—

Acquired

—

Public

—

Status of this dataset: Census fields (batch, status, sector, geography, vertical flags) are complete for all 5,909 rows. Funding, revenue, and founder identities are hand-verified for ~25 top alumni (Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Dropbox, DoorDash, Instacart, Reddit, PagerDuty, GitLab, Brex, Faire, Rippling, Razorpay, Scale AI, Flexport, Vanta, Deel, OpenSea, Zapier, Gusto, Algolia, Twitch, Cruise, Segment, Heroku, Parse). The long tail is flagged in data_gaps.csv.

Cohort size by year

YC went from ~10 companies/year in 2005 to a peak of 727 in 2021. Recent batches have stabilised around 400–630/year as YC settled into 3–4 batches per year.

AI is taking over (and Fintech / Crypto / Marketplace are rolling off)

Share of each cohort tagged as AI-related rose from ~5% pre-2014 to 87% in 2025. Fintech and Crypto/Web3 peaked in 2021–2022 and have fallen sharply. DevTools is unusually steady at ~90/year since 2019.

Outcome funnel by cohort

For cohorts that have had time to play out, ~30–50% of companies are Acquired or Public. Recent cohorts (2022+) are still overwhelmingly Active because outcomes haven't materialized yet — survivorship bias goes both ways.

Geography

Top countries (all batches)

US vs. non-US over time

Sector mix (full directory)

Sector is inferred from YC tags + industry. B2B and Consumer dominate; AI/devtools/fintech/healthcare/biotech are large verticals on top of those.

Headline findings

What the data shows

AI everywhere. AI-flagged cohort share: ~5% (pre-2014) → 26% (2018) → 78% (2024) → 87% (2025).
Fintech/Crypto crash. Fintech-flagged companies fell from 177 (2022) to 31 (2026). Crypto peaked at 31 (2022), now ~3/year.
DevTools is a durable line. 80–105 dev-tools companies per year from 2020–2026; almost no cyclicality.
Exit rate. 2005–2014 cohorts have 30–50% acq+IPO; 2015–2020 settle around 15–25%; 2022+ still <10% (mostly time-not-yet-elapsed).
Public alumni now have ~$35B+ FY2024 revenue combined. Airbnb $11.1B, DoorDash $10.7B, Coinbase $6.6B, Instacart $3.4B, Dropbox $2.5B, Reddit $1.3B, GitLab $759M, PagerDuty $467M.

What's still incomplete

YC's public dump doesn't include founder names, funding rounds, valuations, or revenue. Filled in for ~25 prominent alumni only.
Acquirer + date is known for 7 companies; the other 772 acquired companies need press / Crunchbase research.
YC's status field lags reality — many 2020–2022 "Active" companies have quietly stopped operating.
Sector tagging is heuristic. Most rows would benefit from manual recategorization, especially the "Other" bucket.

→ See methodology & next-pass plan