Riften

Earned intelligence for every company

YC Summer 2026Developer ToolsReinforcement LearningOpen SourceInfrastructureAI

About Riften

Intelligence will be the most valuable asset a company owns. Today, almost every company rents it. Companies pay a handful of labs one token at a time. Each dollar buys an answer, not an asset. They spend more, but own nothing more. Riften reverses that. Change one environment variable and Riften becomes the gateway for a company's AI traffic. We route each request to the lowest-cost model that can do the job, serving most work on open-weight models we host. Customers save money immediately without rebuilding their products. The gateway is the entry point. Over time, Riften turns the company's work into private models built on open weights and shaped around the business. What begins as cheaper inference becomes an intelligence stack the company owns, runs on infrastructure it controls, and uses to power its most important applications. We call this earned intelligence. It is created by the company's own work, controlled by the company, and accumulated over time. The next generation of companies will not rent their intelligence. They will earn it, own it, and compound it. Riften is how they get there.

Founder

  • Carl Stauffer

    Founder

    Founder and CEO of Riften. Palantir’s first Neurodivergent Fellow through Alex Karp’s program: Forward Deployed Engineer embedded with a nine-figure manufacturing account and building systems across purchasing and production. a16z Scout. Former nuclear researcher at Jefferson Lab. CS and AMS at Johns Hopkins.

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