Interactive 3D map of 3k YC companies by similarity (Three.js and D3)
Try it: We mapped 2,970 Y Combinator companies in 3D by product similarity - 57% of YC's entire portfolio since 2005. Jump right in and explore: pan/zoom around, click for detailed profiles, explore clusters. No signup required, works best on desktop. Why Sometimes it's hard to grasp the bigger picture and see the forest for the trees. This map gives an overall representation of the whole space - companies, clusters, and outliers (companies that don't have obvious similar counterparts). For example, there are three companies supporting innovation labs. Also it's fun to see how LegalTech…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Try it: We mapped 2,970 Y Combinator companies in 3D by product similarity - 57% of YC's entire portfolio since 2005. Jump right in and explore: pan/zoom around, click for detailed profiles, explore clusters. No signup required, works best on desktop. Why Sometimes it's hard to grasp the bigger picture and see the forest for the trees. This map gives an overall representation of the whole space - companies, clusters, and outliers (companies that don't have obvious similar counterparts). For example, there are three companies supporting innovation labs. Also it's fun to see how LegalTech is very compact but very far away cluster. What stood out A surprisingly large Government & Public Sector Solutions cluster and Accounting for SMBs. LegalTech forms a compact but isolated cluster. And three lone outliers — all research lab equipment companies. How it works Input: company URL → Our own crawler extracts product signals from public pages. Representation: ML embeddings (multidimensional similarity). Projection: UMAP algorithm reduces to 3D coordinates. Clustering: hybrid algorithm groups similar companies; clusters auto-labeled by AI. Anthropic has similar approach in their Clio paper, if someone is interested. UI: three.js scene + d3 interactions (search/filter/hover). Visualization inspired by Music Galaxy (https://galaxy.spotifytrack.net/) Scope & coverage Dataset: 2,970 companies from YC's 5,200+ portfolio (Summer 2005 to August 2025). Coverage includes active companies plus many acquired/defunct ones we could access. We respected robots.txt; some sites missing or had limited crawlable content. UMAP is non-deterministic; we use consistent seeds but local neighborhoods can shift. Similarity ≠ endorsement; not affiliated with YC! Looking for feedback This sits on top of our B2B company mapping engine and we are launching more products. Would letting you drop in any company URL to see where it lands be useful? API? Roadmap Projecting any company in this space for comparison; Regular refresh as companies pivot and grow; API to get consteallation for your own project. Learnings Visualization started as a small project with 5 moving points in 3D space and escalated to a full solution based on three.js and d3. This wouldn't be possible without AI assistance powering data collection, embeddings, and clustering. Happy to dig into the technical details if folks are curious.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- AMA Map of All YC Companies (5,300 Startups by Batch and Location)2025 · yc.foundersaround.com · ▲74
- MOMap of YC Startups2024 · yc-map.vercel.app · ▲104
Hey Everybody! Hope you had a merry christmas Today I had a bit of fun with Claude. Started by scraping YC's startups list, then ran them through OpenAI's embedding service, then UMAP'd the embedding to reduce the dimension to just two coordinates and then just forced Claude to write React that would compile to visualize that. I had fun and I think it's interesting, so take a look! Also note that you won't be able to zoom on mobile (found about this Plotly limitation way too late). If there's interest I can fix this issue by changing plotting libs tomorrow :) Merry christmas
More life & fun this month
the category →- TL
Life & fun · 10d ago · louisabraham.github.io
Photosynthesis fires two of your iPhone
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Life & fun · 28d ago · solouno.io
Scroll through all 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 reachable Rubik's Cube permutations.
Life & fun · 27d ago · everycube.alen.is
Hi HN, I built Eigendrum, a web tool that solves the 2D wave equation for arbitrary shapes so you can hear what they sound like as drums. How it works: * Solves -∇²u = λu using finite element analysis (Kφ = λMφ) on a triangle mesh. * Validated to <0.1% error against closed-form solutions for circles (Bessel zeros) and rectangles. * Sound model factors in strike location, Rayleigh damping, and mallet width. * Includes Kac drums I & II to demonstrate identical sound spectra from different geometries. * No frameworks, build steps, or dependencies. Repo and tests:…
Life & fun · 27d ago · baselashraf81.github.io
Launched alongside, August 2025
the whole month →
- IS
I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it. It draws a single pixel at a time and takes 30-60 minutes to complete a single image. Anyone can participate in the project by voting for the next image to be drawn, and submitting images. https://kilopx.com/
Work · 2025 · benholmen.com
- KT
Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…
Dev tools · 2025 · github.com
- IW
I was wondering how I can arrange objects along a spherical helix path, and read some articles on it. I ended up learning about parametric equations again, and make this visualization to document what I learned: https://visualrambling.space/moving-objects-in-3d/ feel free to visit and let me know what you think!
Life & fun · 2025 · visualrambling.space
- TC
For HTML Day 2025 [1], I made a web service that displays the current sky at your approximate location as a CSS gradient. Colours are simulated on-demand using atmospheric absorption and scattering coefficients. Updates every minute, without the use of client-side JavaScript. Source code and additional information is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dnlzro/horizon [1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
Dev tools · 2025 · sky.dlazaro.ca