Is ycombinator.com legit or a scam?
Official Y Combinator accelerator site with 21-year history, clean security profile, and extensive portfolio of successful companies including Airbnb, Stripe, and Coinbase.
Analysis Summary
No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site. See full visual analysis →
MT Intelligence
Y Combinator is a well-established, publicly-known startup accelerator founded in 2005 by Paul Graham and others. The domain has been active for over 21 years (registered in 2005), and our antivirus network shows zero malicious detections across 92 engines. The SSL certificate is valid, the hosting IP has zero abuse reports, and the page content matches the legitimate organization's official self-description. Business registration confirms Y Combinator, LLC as an active entity founded in California in March 2005 with extensive public documentation. The site hosts Hacker News, Startup School, and maintains a directory of 5,400+ funded companies. While the evidence package includes a small number of negative applicant reviews on independent review sites concerning application-process transparency, these reflect operational feedback rather than fraud or scam activity. No phishing, credential harvesting, or financial fraud has been detected on this domain.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for ycombinator.com, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- ycombinator.com is the official website of Y Combinator, LLC, the prominent startup accelerator founded in 2005 by Paul Graham and others.
- Domain has been active for over 21 years (7754 days aligns with 2005 founding); consistently referenced as the primary site across Wikipedia, LinkedIn, official social channels, and news.ycombinator.com (Hacker News).
- YC has funded over 5,400 companies including Coinbase (S2012), Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, DoorDash; maintains active programs like Startup School, Work at a Startup, and Demo Days.
- No direct scam reports or phishing associated with the exact domain ycombinator.com; related discussions concern phishing on typosquats (e.g., y-comblnator.com) or fake YC founder profiles on co-founder matching.
- Trustpilot shows low review volume (2-3 reviews) with mixed-to-negative applicant feedback on application process transparency and communication; no widespread fraud complaints.
- Page content provided (title, description) matches verbatim the legitimate ycombinator.com homepage.
- No evidence of crypto airdrop scams, wallet draining, or Coinbase impersonation on this domain; Coinbase is prominently listed as a successful YC alum.
- Trustpilotopen
"Garbage site and people. Absolutely horrible and time-wasting experience."
- Trustpilotopen
"Applying to Y Combinator has been an incredibly disappointing experience. Lack of Transparency & Meaningful Feedback."
- Redditopen
"Applying to Y Combinator was a uniquely bad experience. I was rejected with no questions and no interview despite half a dozen recommendations."
Y Combinator, LLC, founded March 2005 in California; well-documented accelerator with Wikipedia page, official site matching domain, LinkedIn, and 5,000+ portfolio companies including Coinbase, Airbnb, Stripe.
Our research confirmed ycombinator.com as the official website of Y Combinator, LLC, the prominent startup accelerator founded in 2005. The domain is extensively documented across Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and major news outlets. A small number of applicant reviews on independent review sites express concerns about application-process transparency and communication, but these reflect operational feedback rather than fraud or scam activity. No phishing, credential harvesting, or financial fraud has been associated with this domain. Related security concerns involve typosquats (e.g., y-comblnator.com) or fake founder profiles on co-founder matching platforms, not the official ycombinator.com domain itself.
Antivirus Engines
Security Scans
Checked against the major public blocklists used by browsers and security tools — no hits.
Contact Verification
We fetched the page and looked for real-world contact details. Legitimate businesses almost always publish an email on their own domain, a phone number, and a postal address. Scam shops usually don't.
- No contact email found anywhere on the page.
- No phone number listed on the page.
- No postal address visible on the page.
- Page impersonates Coinbase on a non-official domain.
- Links to 5 social profiles.
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1301http://ycombinator.com/
- 2200https://www.ycombinator.com/cross-domain
Server Reputation
Still, stay alert
No major threat indicators — but a clean scan does not guarantee every page is safe, and phishing emails routinely spoof real domains.
- Double-check the exact URL in your address bar
Confirm you are actually on ycombinator.com and not a lookalike like y-combinator.com.com or an IDN homoglyph.
- Use a password manager
Password managers only auto-fill on the exact domain they were saved for — they refuse to fill lookalike domains, which is the single best phishing defence.
- OpenDiscuss this site on the forum
If you have first-hand experience with this site — good or bad — share it with the MalwareTips community.
Reputation Sources
How this domain rates across independent threat-intelligence and blocklist providers.
Referenced Domains
Outbound domains this page links to or loads resources from. Each links to its own security scan.
Safety FAQ
Common questions about this site, answered directly from the scan data above — so the answers always reflect the latest verdict on this page.
- Our automated security review found no threat indicators on ycombinator.com. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- ycombinator.com passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 92/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. ycombinator.com presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Amazon · Amazon RSA 2048 M04, expiring in 209 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- ycombinator.com is 21.2 years old, registered on 3/20/2005 through Gandi SAS. Scam domains are often freshly registered — a site under 6 months old warrants extra caution.
- No. All 92 antivirus engines in our malware network report ycombinator.com as clean.
- No. ycombinator.com is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- ycombinator.com resolves to an IP operated by Amazon.com, Inc. in US (usage type: Content Delivery Network). Hosting location alone doesn't make a site good or bad, but unusual geography for a brand's claimed country is one of many signals we weigh.
- Yes. ycombinator.com sits in the global top-100k on Cloudflare Radar, which means it has substantial real-world traffic. That does not automatically make it safe, but established brands almost always rank here and throwaway scam domains almost never do.
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