Michael Jeffords is Co-Founder at Conifer (YC S26), a local-first AI routing platform that connects teams to every AI model and automatically routes each request to the cheapest model that accomplishes the goal, cutting AI spend by up to 80%.

Michael previously co-founded The HeartCheck Foundation, scaling free hypertension screenings to 20+ barbershops and over 10,000 individuals, and served as a clinical researcher at the Dell Med Institute of Vascular Surgery and UTHSC, specializing in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

Michael engineered an ML-driven computer vision pipeline using pose estimation for early-onset ALS and Parkinson's detection, showcasing a deep technical foundation in applied machine learning and biomedical research.

At Conifer, Michael and co-founder Charles Muehlberger built the inference engine from the ground up in Rust, achieving decode speeds up to 60% faster than llama.cpp, and secured backing through Y Combinator's Summer 2026 cohort.

Conifer's platform serves teams seeking to unify AI infrastructure under one interface and one invoice, with most requests running free on local hardware and sensitive data kept fully on-device via a secure mode.