Conifer (YC S26) — Least cost routing system to reduce 80%+ token spend
There are thousands of models, providers, and harnesses, each with its own pricing and strengths, leaving an overwhelming number of choices when it comes to managing token spend and intelligence. Conifer uses intelligent routing and orchestration logic to handle the full path of each query: model selection, provider choice, and cache management.
Sell to companies like these? Paste your website and see 10 with a filed reason to buy this month. Free.
Opens in a new tab. No signup.
What it does Least cost routing system to reduce 80%+ token spend (source)
Example from a real report (our sample on Target): “Target eliminated approximately 1,800 corporate positions, with around 1,000 employees receiving layoff notices and the remainder accounted for by eliminating open roles.” Source: NBC News
There are thousands of models, providers, and harnesses, each with its own pricing and strengths, leaving an overwhelming number of choices when it comes to managing token spend and intelligence. Conifer uses intelligent routing and orchestration logic to handle the full path of each query: model selection, provider choice, and cache management. It all runs inside your existing harness, so tools like Claude Code and Codex work without changing your setup. By centralizing where inference occurs, Conifer lets companies save on their inference bill while leaving teams free to focus on what they are building.
What the site is built with
Next.jsframeworkCloudflarehosting
Read from the page's own HTML and response headers on 10 September 2026, at https://www.conifer.build/. Each badge matched a string the site serves about itself — hover one to see which. Nothing here is a traffic, ranking or revenue figure: those cannot be read off a page and are not claimed.
Checked away from the directory entry. Neither line below comes from the company's Y Combinator page.
Conifer routes to the Pareto frontier: the cheapest seat that still clears the work. Name a model and that model is served.
The title and description the site itself served, answering 200. Not a cached copy and not the company's directory entry — what was live when we asked.
Counted only where a thread links to this company's own site, announces it by name on that forum, or names it beside its own Y Combinator batch. A thread whose title merely carries the words is not counted — a name is not an identifier. Hacker News is not us, and nothing above is our opinion of the company.
Michael Jeffords
Founder/CGO
Co-founder at Conifer (YC S26). Previously co-founded The HeartCheck Foundation, scaling free hypertension screenings to 20+ barbershops and over 10,000 individuals. Engineered an ML-driven computer vision pipeline using pose estimation for early-onset ALS and Parkinson's detection. Former clinical researcher at the Dell Med Institute of Vascular Surgery and UTHSC, specializing in hematopoetic stem cell transplantation, achieving infiltration levels >90% in mouse models.
Charles Muehlberger
Founder/CTO
Founder at Conifer. Engineering researcher at Princeton, accelerating multi-modal inference on edge devices and designing physics simulation software for coupled laser reservoirs and machine learning with physical neural networks. Previously built custom edge AI devices for RF-based brain injury modeling at DoW, and helped engineer the world record holding fastest electric speedboat at PES.
Founders, titles and bios as the company published them. Photographs are our own copies of the ones on that record, so they do not break when the original link expires.
No investor is drawn from a Form D — the form states how many invested and never who. The one investor on this graph is named because a batch has exactly one.
Want the whole picture on Conifer?
Example from a real report (our sample on Target): “Target eliminated approximately 1,800 corporate positions, with around 1,000 employees receiving layoff notices and the remainder accounted for by eliminating open roles.” Source: NBC News
A Full Report on Conifer: verified, sourced, every claim cited, ready in a few minutes. See pricing.
What the Full Report on Conifer covers
The Short Answer
Which Company This Is
What They Do, And How The Money Works
Who Runs It, And How To Reach Them
The Money: Funding, Valuation, Runway
Who Pays Them, And Who They Are Up Against
Warning Bells
Sources
10 cited sources found
Plus the sections for what you are deciding, which you pick after ordering.
You get an alert in MentionFox the next time this company shows up.
Is this you?
If you're behind Conifer: acceptance into a YC batch is one of the few weeks a young company gets looked up by people who matter — investors, other founders, press. FoxPlug turns the commits, deploys, and releases you're already making into that story automatically, so anyone who looks finds something current. GetFoxChat puts a guide on your own site so the people YC's own page just sent you don't read one line and leave.
