Charles Muehlberger is Co-Founder of Conifer (YC S26), a local-first AI inference platform that intelligently routes queries between on-device and cloud models to slash token spend by up to 80%.
Charles is an engineering researcher at Princeton University, where he accelerated multi-modal inference on edge devices and designed physics simulation software for machine learning with physical neural networks.
Driven by the belief that those building AI now shape its future, Charles took a gap year from Princeton to launch Conifer in San Francisco, turning down offers from major tech and aerospace firms.
Charles previously built custom edge AI devices for RF-based brain injury modeling, co-founded The HeartCheck Foundation serving over 10,000 individuals, and helped engineer the world record holding fastest electric speedboat.
Conifer's inference engine, built from scratch in Rust, achieves decode speeds up to 60% faster than llama.cpp, enabling on-device AI to become the default starting point rather than a hobbyist feature.
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