Charles Muehlberger, founder of Conifer, is listed as a speaker at The Next Endeavor Silicon Valley AI Summit held September 14 and 15, 2026 at Google Bay View, speaking in the Impact track on both days of the summit.
An interview post with Michael Jeffords, founder of Conifer (YC S26). The conversation covered Michael's journey and background and how Conifer got started, the company's experience at Y Combinator and how it helped shape the startup, the founder mindset and lessons from building from zero, and why distribution matters just as much as building a great product.
Conifer’s open-source SDK provides TypeScript and Python clients, plus an MCP server, for its model gateway. It routes requests across major models using OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible interfaces, returns itemized settled costs to the nanodollar, and enforces customer spend ceilings before upstream calls. Its five MCP tools include conifer_complete, which reports turn cost; migration shims for Vercel AI Gateway, OpenRouter, and Helicone reject unsupported settings rather than silently dropping them.
