Embed Data Chat & Chat With YC Company Directory

Your users want to ask data questions directly in your product. Let them! camelAI is a drop‑in <iframe> that gives your users a complete analytics chat experience.

The Problem

• Users constantly request custom insights and charts that aren’t worth hard‑coding into your dashboard.
• Engineers waste cycles on one‑off data pulls.
• Building a chat‑with‑data feature from scratch means months of work plus ongoing maintenance.

The 5‑Minute Fix

With camelAI’s API & iframe, you can embed a fully featured, customizable Chat With Your Data experience in ~5 minutes.

👉 Get started self‑serve: https://camelai.com/api

YC Demo: Chat with the YC Company Directory

We scraped public YC data (5,294 companies) and wired it into camelAI to show what’s possible.

Try it yourself — no login required, completely free: https://camelai.com/demos/y-combinator-companies/

Ask questions like

• “Five years after Demo Day, what % of companies are still active?”
• “Plot founding team size against survival rates.”
• “Which batches have the highest acquisition rates?”

Note: Funding and revenue data isn’t publicly available, so it isn’t included in this dataset.

What We Discovered About YC Companies

I started by asking camelAI to plot YC companies per year, broken down by status:

Key Findings

• YC’s footprint has grown every year since 2005, with explosive growth post‑2018
• Peak intake: 2021 (727 companies), followed by 2022 (633) and 2024 (599)
• 2025 already shows 365 companies (dataset still incomplete)

Survival Rates (2005‑2020 Cohorts)

Then I analyzed survival rates for 2005- 2020 cohorts to remove any recency bias.

YC Survival Rate Rate Line Chart (2005-2020)

YC Survival Rate Rate Table (2005-2020)

camelAI definition Survived = Active + Acquired + Public Inactive = Dead / Defunct

1. Average survival sits just under two‑thirds

   • Across the full window the mean survival rate (2005‑2020) is 61.9%

2. Clear upward trend over time

   Period	Avg. Survival
   2005‑2010	~50%
   2011‑2015	~65%
   2016‑2020	~75%

   Survival has improved by roughly 25 percentage points in fifteen years.

3. 2008 is the outlier low point

   • 2008 cohort survival: 27.9%
   • Aligns with the global financial crisis suggesting macro shocks hit young startups hard.

4. Post‑2014 cohorts consistently clear the 70 % bar

   • 2014 & 2015: just above 71 %
   • 2016‑2020 climb steadily, reaching ~79 % for the 2020 class after 4+ years in the market.

5. Why the improvement?

   • YC dramatically scaled batch sizes after 2014 but managed to hold number of failures fairly flat (≈ 60‑90/yr).
   • With a larger denominator, the inactive share naturally shrinks.
   • A friendlier venture environment (cheap capital) in the 2013‑2021 cycle extended runway for many companies.

Acquisition Dynamics

• 2014‑2017 mark the peak years for acquisition counts.
• Later cohorts: more of the “survived” bucket remains Active (fewer exits so far) indicating longer paths to liquidity.

Take‑Aways (Removing Recency Bias)

• A YC startup launched 2005‑2020 has ~2‑in‑3 odds of being alive or having exited successfully today.
• Survival odds have improved materially, but downturns (e.g., 2008) can halve those odds for a given cohort.

These insights come straight from camelAI’s filtered Survival‑Rate Table and Line Chart.

Bring Chat With Your Data to Your Product

• Get started (self‑serve): https://camelai.com/api
• Prefer to chat? Book time → Founder's Calendar

Stop hand‑coding SQL queries. Let your users discover insights themselves.