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expand.ai
YC S24San Francisco, US · Founded 2024 · 2 employees · 6 known investors
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expand.ai converts websites into structured APIs that developers can query for data, handling technical challenges like bot detection and browser scaling while ensuring data accuracy.
Also known as ExpandAI, Inc. · ExpandAI · expand-ai
Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (S24)
expand.ai was founded in 2024 by Tim Suchanek.
Investors · 6
How we know: Y Combinator's founder network · pioneerfund.vc · open dataset · 5k.vc investor directory · Not right? Tell us
How we know: the Y Combinator directory · open dataset · 5k.vc investor directory · Not right? Tell us
How we know: the VCSheet dataset · Y Combinator's founder network · Not right? Tell us
How we know: Y Combinator's founder network · Not right? Tell us
How we know: Y Combinator's founder network · Not right? Tell us
How we know: Y Combinator's founder network · Not right? Tell us
The YC application· Summer 2024 batch
Alumni Q&A
- How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
- The founder, Tim, spent the prior 8 years in developer tools, serving as founding engineer at Prisma and later founding Stellate. While building AI apps he found that obtaining the right data was often the initial blocker, which led him to build expand.ai so the web can be used as a data source for AI apps.
Summarized from the founders' answers on their Y Combinator profile.
Company profile
researched Aug 2026expand.ai is a developer tools and infrastructure company that converts websites into type-safe APIs returning structured data. Users pass one or more source URLs to the service, which can auto-generate a data schema for the target pages or accept a user-defined schema, and then returns typed records matching it. Alongside instant on-demand requests, the company offers dataset building, in which extraction results are synced into a dataset that can be exported to destinations such as S3, Postgres or Google Sheets; this dataset capability is labeled as coming soon on the company website.
Beyond scraping public web pages, the product accepts user-supplied inputs such as internal documents and PDFs, and can use the wider internet as a data source in response to a natural-language prompt. A separate markdown endpoint returns semantic markdown intended for direct use as context for large language models. The company states it handles operational aspects of web extraction on the customer's behalf, including bot protection, JavaScript rendering, stealth mode, proxies, browser infrastructure and auto-healing crawlers, and that extracted data is checked and traced back to its source.
Founding story
Founder and CEO Tim Suchanek had worked on developer tools for about eight years before starting expand.ai, serving as a founding engineer at Prisma and then founding Stellate. While building AI applications he found that obtaining the right data was frequently the blocker to starting a project, which led him to build expand.ai so that the web could be used as a data source for AI applications.
Business model
expand.ai sells extraction and dataset infrastructure as an API-based developer service; access at the time of the sources was gated behind a waitlist.
Traction
The company website reports 22 million pages scraped to date. Y Combinator lists the company as active with a team size of two.
Latest developments
The website advertises a forthcoming dataset feature that persists extraction results into named datasets queryable through a client and exportable to external stores, and access to the product is offered through a waitlist.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history
Market position
expand.ai positions itself in the developer tools and infrastructure segment as a web-to-API extraction layer for AI applications, competing on type safety, data quality with source tracing, extraction speed and managed crawling infrastructure.
Stated points of difference include instant type-safe APIs with auto-generated but customizable schemas, verification of extracted data with traceability to the source page, extraction models described as up to 10x faster than GPT-4o mini, and fully managed handling of bot protection, proxies and browser infrastructure.
Technology
The service pairs crawling infrastructure with AI extraction models. An AI schema designer infers a schema for a given website, which developers can override with their own model definitions and typed fields. Extraction outputs are back-checked and traced to the source page. The company states its extraction models are up to 10x faster than GPT-4o mini and that its infrastructure scales to millions of pages, handling JavaScript rendering, bot protection, stealth mode, proxies, browser management and auto-healing. Additional endpoints return semantic markdown for LLM consumption and sync results into exportable datasets.
Go-to-market
Self-serve developer sign-up via a waitlist on the company website, with code-first API examples as the primary product demonstration; the company is associated with the Y Combinator network.
Developers and teams building AI applications that need structured web data, plus users who want datasets assembled from public websites and their own documents.
Geography
Based in San Francisco, United States; the service extracts data from public websites globally.
History
The company was founded in 2024 and participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, with San Francisco as its location and a team size of two.
Compiled by commissioned research from 6 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Images
Related companies · 8
Companies working in the same space as expand.ai.
Timeline · 1
launches, deals, and filingsexpand.ai is listed as a Y Combinator Summer 2024 batch company, with Nicolas Dessaigne as primary partner; the company website states it is backed by Y Combinator.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
Legal entities · 1
corporate structure▸Research sources · 6
primary sources listed
- expand.aiexpand.ai · web
6 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does expand.ai do?
- expand.ai turns any website into a type-safe API that developers can query for structured data.
- Who founded expand.ai?
- expand.ai was founded by Tim Suchanek in 2024.
- Who are expand.ai's investors?
- expand.ai's investors include Pioneer, Y Combinator, Script Capital, Sequoia Capital, System.One, Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company.
- Where is expand.ai headquartered?
- expand.ai is headquartered in San Francisco, US.