Lab · Interactive
The YC Atlas
Every Y Combinator company in the public directory — 6,215 of them — turned into a 384-dimension vector by a model running on my own CPU, then flattened onto one screen. Companies sit near each other when they describe themselves alike. Nothing here is ranked, scored, or predicted.
How it was built
The directory snapshot comes from the YC-OSS
community mirror of YC's public company index. It is not an official YC API.
Each company's description, tags and sector are concatenated and embedded with
paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 (384 dimensions) through fastembed/ONNX,
on CPU, locally. No embedding API was called and nothing left the machine.
Names, dates and outcome-flavoured marketing phrases are stripped before embedding, so the vector describes the activity rather than the result. That scrubbing is imperfect: a confident press-release tone still leaks through.
Clusters come from KMeans on the full vectors; the map is t-SNE over the first 50 principal components. The nearest-neighbour list in the panel is computed by cosine similarity in all 384 dimensions — not from the two-dimensional picture. That distinction is the whole point: the map is a convenience, the vectors are the data.
What this cannot tell you
- Accepted only. Rejected applications are not public, so nothing here describes what YC turns down.
- Present tense. Descriptions are today's, after any pivot. This is not what the company pitched at admission.
- Status is not performance. Active is a directory flag, not profitability. Acquired is not proof of a gain. Inactive is not a loss figure.
- Distance lies a little. t-SNE preserves neighbourhoods, not global distances — the gap between two islands means nothing.
- Clusters are exploratory. The number of groups is a heuristic, and their labels are the terms that dominate them, not a taxonomy.
- Young batches have no outcomes yet. Comparing a 2026 cohort's status to a 2012 cohort's compares two different amounts of elapsed time.
The analysis built on this: AGI is almost here. What does YC actually fund in 2026?