Every Y Combinator company, explained in plain words — for people who don't speak startup jargon.
Startup and tech words in plain language, with the standard meaning underneath.
A directory of every launched Y Combinator startup, rewritten without jargon. Every description is in plain words; each profile keeps the company's original wording underneath, so you can always see what they actually say. It's for anyone who reads "synergistic B2B SaaS platform" and feels nothing.
Y Combinator (YC) is the best-known startup investor and school. A few times a year it picks a group of new companies, gives each some money in exchange for a small ownership stake, and coaches them for about three months. Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, DoorDash and Reddit all started there.
Each group that goes through YC together is a batch, named after its season and year and shown here as a short code: W26 is Winter 2026, X25 is Spring 2025, S25 is Summer 2025, F24 is Fall 2024.
B2B — sells to other companies. Consumer — sells to regular people. Fintech — money. Healthcare — fixing humans. Industrials — machines, energy, space. Real Estate & Construction. Education. Government — selling to or fixing public systems.
Every profile shows the four things investors look at, each rated high, medium or low. For about fifty-five well-known companies these are hand-written; for everyone else they are read automatically from the data (status, stage, team size, category) and labeled as such.
Names, batches, categories and descriptions come from the public yc-oss API, a daily-updated mirror of the official YC directory (snapshot: July 2026). Founder names, titles, photos and social links come from each company's public YC page. Stories and signals for about fifty-five well-known companies were written by hand.
The automatic caveman translations are simple word substitution — occasionally they come out strange. That is part of the charm. For exact wording, see the original description on any profile.