It's easy to scrape YC startups from https://www.ycombinator.com/companies. Scrape that and a dozen other investors' portfolio pages and you'll have a useful fraction of startups.
Or are you talking about some other API?
I expect "verified" to mean that either you or someone else has confirmed it, not just that an LLM was asked for one.
You could have a "traction" stat and ask for a JS snippet be installed on homepages or a set of pages. Old school and unreliable. Registered users is also a good way to assess traction. Not sure how that information could be readily obtained.
In my previous comment I mentioned attaching a crypto address to domains - you could do that too. That'd be interesting. One feature you could add long-term is crowdfunding. Either for new features, code releases, media, documents - whatever.
Crowdfunding activity on startups and individuals would be a great way to measure traction.
I think it's important to attach a bunch of people to any given startup (you've already done it.) Going forward, I'd expect more startups to behave like bands. Any 1 person can be attached to a number of bands, but eventually one of these bands will make it big and the members will get locked-in. Staff also bring users, credibility and hence traction early on.
"If you want something done, ask a busy person."
Build trust by: truly making this a public good, by open sourcing it. Be the maitnainer. Data dump every week as a zipball/tarball. These will ensure you can't rugpull.
With this trust, offer an extension (open source of course) to all, which whever a user goes through crunchbase, traxn, etc, sends any factual data (hence non-copyrightable) to you. If you gained trust, I would also do this.
You get the right to be a maintainer, and figure out if you also want to make a business with it on top.
https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/overview/auth/oauth
Would be a good way to have others absorb some of your inference limits and fill in missing data that they need. A call to action on a blank search would be a great flow.
I saw Clerk and noticed that it says that they have verified 250 months runway. Maybe true but sounds crazy high.
Maybe if there's a specific article a verification is attributed to, you could add it being cited?
Anyways thanks for making this.
Why do you ask again for feedback after three days?
Build and sharing is awesome
You could even back some of the data from there