About startup.is
Every startup, as it is right now
startup.is is a registry of startups, built from what can be seen from the outside: the day a company first showed itself, the name it chose, whether its website still answers, and what it says about itself in its own words.
The first entries are launches posted on Hacker News ("Show HN") over the last twelve months that stand on their own domain. Each links to the post it came from and to the website as our crawler last saw it. Hosted projects on GitHub, app stores and platforms are not listed: a startup has a domain.
A listing is a fact, not an endorsement. Founders will be able to claim their record by proving the domain, correct it, and publish statements ("we are raising", "we have shut down") that agents can read and verify. Nothing here is ranked, paid for or generated.
What we stand for
Open by default. Every record can be read by anyone: a person, a crawler or an agent. Each one is served as a page, as Markdown, as JSON, in feeds and through an API.
Nothing gated. No login walls, no bot challenges on content, no pay-per-crawl.
Proof on every write. Listings change only with proof: a confirmation from the organiser, or the organisation's own website saying so. Every record names its source.
How it is paid for. Services around the data (featured placement, verification, higher API limits), never by locking the data up.