Ark.com was a people search engine founded in San Francisco in March 2012 by Patrick Riley and Yiming Liu, and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch. It indexed over a billion public social network profiles and let users search across them by hometown, city, school, employer and interests.
The company raised a $4.2M seed round in April 2012 from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and SV Angel, and reached the finals of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012.
Status: defunct. Y Combinator lists the company as Inactive; PitchBook lists it as Out of Business. As of a July 2026 probe, ark.com redirects to www.ark-invest.com (the unrelated ARK Investment Management), https://ark.com times out, and no api., developer., docs. or www. subdomain resolves.
Ark never published a public API, developer portal or SDKs, so this repo carries no API artifacts — it is retained as a historical a16z portfolio record.
Not to be confused with ARK Investment Management (ark-funds.com), the ARK Ecosystem blockchain (ark.io / ark.dev), or AI Ark (ai-ark.com).
Backed by: a16z, Greylock Partners, SV Angel