I've been building StartupWiki, a free startup database designed to make it easier to discover and research companies.The original motivation was frustration with how difficult it can be to find information on early-stage startups. Most databases need accounts, or subscriptions, ro just feel too cluttered. I wanted a website that felt like Wikipedia, no accounts, no subscriptions, no weird metrics, just go in, the info is on the page.
The project is still very early, but currently includes:
Startup profiles
Search and filtering
Company categorization
Public API (in progress)
I'm especially interested in feedback on:
What information you look for when researching startups
Features missing from existing startup databases
API use cases
I'd love to hear feedback.
▲0 for 10 on some startups (large and small, YC and not) that came to mind.
It's easy to scrape YC startups from https://www.ycombinator.com/companies. Scrape that and a dozen other investors' portfolio pages and you'll have a useful fraction of startups.
Sounds good! its just I used up most of my API key limits in development, and I'm keeping some so I can run improvement pipelines or fix errors, so il batch the YC companies day by day, there's 5000 companies, so il do about 800 each day for 5-6 days.
reply▲Same here. I work with a lot of startups, some of them very prominent and none of them are listed.
reply▲The search for Luma and Saronic didn't work
reply▲androiddrew9 minutes ago
[-] Yeah tried my own start up and found nothing. I don't know where your sources come from
reply▲I expected the VERIFIED badges to link to some sort of provenance information. That seems like a must, otherwise (given the "assume everything's incorrect" disclaimers) I'm not sure why one would take that badge seriously.
reply▲Yeah, the "verified" badges are useless if they don't link to sources or at least provide some indication of how they were verified and when.
reply▲I got the agents to cite sources, there's a bug with fetching the urls from the DB, the way it should work is when you hit verified it leads you to the source, working on fixing it now. Also I will try to add an agent ledger tab soon, that shows exactly what the agents were doing.
reply▲It sounds like none of the data will be reliable? Ai and community seems like very little will be true and I will have no idea which part will be true.
reply▲Crunchbase is also not very reliable. It's community/self-reported data.
reply▲Crunchbase is generally self reported data
reply▲How about expose an API so that users can put the name of a startup and it goes through your AI agent pipeline to acquire an estimate? That way, you don’t need to know every startup under the sun and focus on optimizing your pipeline instead.
reply▲a random complain on my part would be the log in with google. hate that. looks great, otherwise. i don't even have a problem creating an account, honestly. but i try to not use the google for anything unless i have to.
reply▲just added a agent ledger, it shows exactly what the agents were doing during the pipeline, u can find it at the top of the sources tab. (it truncates part of the ledger sometimes though, working on fixing that bug)
reply▲you may be relying on AI to do the heavy lifting for you too much. If you are sending out agents, you should have strict rules around the recency of the data they are aggregating. Otherwise, you will end up with outdated and useless data.
reply▲It is unclear how I can list my company here. Are small companies coming later?
reply▲just launched the button, click it, fill out form, il manually go in aprove, and write your profile.
reply▲I get "JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data"
reply▲reply▲As far as I can tell from FAQs on hacker news, if your previous post failed to gain significant feedback (in this case, only 1 user interacted with my old post) you are allowed to repost in 36 hours.
reply▲what's wrong with that? Just ignore the post if you don't want to see it.
Build and sharing is awesome
I see quite outdated data. Anthropic listed with valuation 18B and latest round at 4b? Just to compare, their real latest round was 65b with valuation 965b.
reply▲yeah, just spotted the error, AI agents seem to be searching for news without adding keywords like "latest", I'm updating that, and changing some system prompts, also adding a fact checking agent, and restarting the server to run an imrpovment pipeline to update these profiles. Might take a while for it to finish running though, Il try to update stuff manually till its done.
reply▲hey just checked the pipeline after running, the anthropic profile looks better now. (I will roll out more updates in the next few days to keep improving accuracy)
reply▲Mobile view is not working on my iPhone. Scroll is messed up and the page is not properly fitting in the view.
reply▲Notice this too. Also the animations might be too much for mobile. Consider just listing the cards without them moving horizontally.
reply▲dineshmendhe2 hours ago
[-] I wonder why there are No Micro Companies Yet on the platform?
reply▲micro companies aren't added by me, people submit their own, then I go in and approve, haven't gotten any submissions yet, when I do I'll add them in.
reply▲samcolson422 hours ago
[-] I’ve been trying to submit but hit an error about the string format not being correct. It doesn’t give any indication on which string is wrong.
reply▲Nice initiative. but, I am concerned about the reliability of the data. how are you gonna take care of that?
reply▲AI agents have to cite where they get stuff from, also people can flag issues, and I'm gonna run pipelines periodically to fact check pages. But yeah, with this kind of site I do agree accuracy is gonna take a lot of engineering to improve.
reply▲He's going to take your comment and give it to Claude as a prompt.
reply▲How are you going to take care of the genuineness of the data
reply▲AI agents have to cite sources for each thing (there's a bug with displaying sources, it should let u click a fact and send you to where the agent got it. I'm working on fixing that right now). Users can also flag errors, and I'm going to periodically run fact-checking agents and manually go in and check info. However, obviously this will likely still not be perfect, accuracy will probably be the number 1 challenge with this site.
reply▲just added roughly 20 startups, focusing on biotech
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