Ask your Agent about the startup landscape.
ExploreYC turns Y Combinator and a16z portfolio data into a searchable API. ClawMama turns that API into a research Agent you can question from the chat apps you already use — search companies, compare batches, build lists, and dig into exported data.
What ExploreYC provides
ExploreYC is an independent product that makes startup portfolio data searchable and analyzable: 5,800+ companies across 10+ countries and 10+ industries, with names, one-liners, batches, stages, industries, founders, hiring status, and exit information. Its data sources include the Y Combinator portfolio and the Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) portfolio, and everything is available through a clean REST API.
ExploreYC is not an official Y Combinator service, and ClawMama does not own or host its data — the Agent queries ExploreYC’s API on your behalf, using your own API key.
What the research Agent does
The ExploreYC Startup Research Agent is a Consultant Agent built on the exploreyc-startup-research skill. From a chat message, it can:
- Search and filter — “fintech companies from Summer 2024 that are hiring” becomes one precise API query.
- Profile a company — a structured brief with one-liner, batch, stage, founders, team size, and exit status.
- Map a landscape — group a segment by stage and status, and surface the companies worth watching.
- Compare batches and sources — trends across YC batches, or YC vs. a16z portfolio composition.
- Build lists — BD and investor prospect lists ranked by your criteria, exported as tables.
Live API calls require an ExploreYC API key, configured once as a secret — the Agent never asks you to paste it into chat.
Plans and rate limits
ExploreYC’s current API plans:
| Plan | Requests | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 5 / day | $0 |
| Starter | 500 / day | $29/mo |
| Pro | 5,000 / day | $99/mo |
| Enterprise | Custom | Contact us |
The Agent is built to respect these limits: it budgets calls before starting, prefers one filtered query over many narrow ones, and caches what it fetches.
Go deeper with exports and a local database
For bigger analyses, ExploreYC’s export feature is the key move. Export a filtered view as CSV or JSON, hand the file to your Agent, and it builds a local database from it. From there, every follow-up question — rankings, cross-tabs, keyword digs — runs against your local copy, without spending an API call per question. The Agent tracks the export date and cites it, so you always know how fresh the data is.
The pattern: live API for targeted questions, exported data for deep analysis. Even the Free tier’s 5 calls/day goes a long way when the heavy lifting happens locally.
Get started
- Install the skill from the ClawMama skills repository — directory
exploreyc-startup-research. - Get an API key from ExploreYC and set it as
EXPLOREYC_API_KEY. - Create the ExploreYC Startup Research Agent and start asking questions directly in your chat apps.