Last month I spent three hours looking for YC founders who’d built developer tools. I checked LinkedIn. Scrolled through W21, S21, W22 batch pages. Googled “YC developer tools founders.” Spent hours and found two relevant people. Ugh.

This happens constantly when you’re trying to connect with the right founders. You know exactly who you need to talk to, you just can’t find them.

So I scraped 7,000+ YC profiles and built semantic search over all of it. Probably overkill but whatever.

Now instead of keyword hunting, you ask: - “Find people who raised Series A in climate tech” - “Which YC partners were previously technical founders?” - “Who are the solo founders that made it through YC?” - “Show me people who pivoted from marketplace to SaaS”

The search understands meaning, not just words. Ask for “pivots” and it finds people who “changed direction” or “shifted focus.” Ask for “bootstrapped” and it surfaces “self-funded” and “profitable from day one.”

The data updates from public sources like LinkedIn, company pages. It’s not perfect but it’s way better than manual searching.

Perfect for YC applications too. Instead of cold-emailing random “fintech founders,” find the person who built banking tools for small businesses when you’re building payments for restaurants.

Check it out at sena.so/directories/yc-network. Try complex queries - it handles them better than you’d expect. Sometimes it surprises me tbh.

Worth building for other startup communities?