How to Find Y Combinator Founders in Minutes with Origami

If you're selling to startups, YC founders are some of the best prospects you can target. They have funding, they're moving fast, and they're actively looking for tools to help them scale.

The problem is building a list of them. The YC directory has hundreds of companies per batch, each with its own page, and there's no export button. Most people end up spending hours copying and pasting, or paying for a stale dataset.

With Origami, you can find every founder from any YC batch in minutes — from a single prompt.

Watch It in Action

Here's a full walkthrough of the process, start to finish:

How It Works, Step by Step

Step 1: Type a Prompt

Open Origami and type something like:

Find me YC founders from the Fall 2024 batch.

That's it. No filters to configure, no APIs to set up, no scraping scripts to write.

Step 2: Origami Builds a Plan

Once you send the prompt, Origami's agent reads what you asked and creates a game plan. In this case, it breaks the task into three phases:

1. Scrape YC company profile URLs from the Fall 2024 directory page.
2. Create a companies table and enrich each company with name, domain, and batch details.
3. Find founders at each company using LinkedIn and create a dedicated founders table.

You can see the full plan on the left side of the screen before it starts executing. No surprises — you know exactly what the agent is going to do.

Step 3: The Agent Scrapes the YC Directory

Origami starts executing Phase 1 — scraping the Y Combinator directory for Fall 2024 company profile URLs.

Within about a minute, it pulls 93 companies from that batch and loads them into a table.

Step 4: Company Enrichment

Next, the agent writes the company URLs to a structured table and enriches each one with:

• Company name
• Domain
• Batch (Fall 2024)
• Company description

You end up with a clean table of 93 YC companies, fully populated, without touching a spreadsheet.

Step 5: Founder Discovery

Now Origami moves to Phase 3 — finding the actual founders at each of those 93 companies.

It searches LinkedIn, matches founders to their companies, and creates a new founders table with:

• Founder name
• Title
• LinkedIn URL
• Company name
• Company domain
• YC batch
• Company description

Every row is a real founder from a real YC Fall 2024 company.

Step 6: Go Further (Optional)

Once you have your founders list, you can take it further inside Origami:

• Find email addresses for each founder
• Find phone numbers for direct outreach
• Enrich with additional company data (funding, employee count, tech stack)
• Export to CSV or push directly to your CRM

The initial list is the starting point. From there, you have full control.

Why This Beats Manual Research

	Manual approach	Origami
Time	4–8 hours of copying from YC + LinkedIn	~5 minutes
Coverage	Partial (you'll miss companies)	Complete (93/93 companies)
Founder data	Name only (maybe)	Name, title, LinkedIn, company details
Enrichment	Separate tool, separate step	Built in — emails, phones, firmographics
Repeatable	Start over for each batch	Change the prompt, run again

Use This for Any YC Batch

The prompt works for any batch. Just swap it out:

• "Find me YC founders from the Winter 2025 batch"
• "Find me YC founders from the Summer 2024 batch"
• "Find me YC founders from the Winter 2024 batch working on AI"

You can also combine it with industry filters, funding signals, or specific roles if you're targeting a subset of founders.

Common Follow-Up Prompts

Once you have a founders list, here are prompts that work well as next steps:

Find email addresses for everyone in the founders table.

Which of these companies have raised additional funding since YC?

Find the CTOs at each of these companies.

Add company LinkedIn URLs and employee counts to the companies table.

Each prompt kicks off another agent run that builds on the data you already have.

---

Want to build your own YC founder list? Try it yourself — type one prompt and let Origami do the rest.

Start Free 7-Day Trial (1,000 Credits) →