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Riften launch: what they're building and where to launch next

What they're building

Earned intelligence for every company

Batch
Y Combinator Summer 2026
Industry
B2B
Based
San Francisco, CA, USA

Founders

riften.ai ↗

See their funding details ↗

Riften on the record

What they shipped

  • From its YC profile: 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. (source)

Who is behind it

  • Carl Stauffer, Founder/CEO: Founder and CEO of Riften. Former Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer. Former nuclear researcher at Jefferson Lab. CS and AMS at Johns Hopkins. (source)

Timeline

  1. 2026: founded, per its YC profile. (source)
  2. 2026-08-17: Launch YC post "Riften: Route every AI request. Build the models your company owns.", tagline "Cut LLM spend with one endpoint that selects the lowest-cost model that works.", 11 upvotes when read. (source)

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Where else to launch Riften

  • Product Hunt ↗
    Self-promotion allowedFree
  • Hacker News (Show HN) ↗
    Self-promotion allowed, within the community's rules
    Audience: Hacker News readers; engineers, technical founders, infra-curious people
  • Indie Hackers Forum ↗
    Self-promotion allowed
    Audience: IndieHackers; bootstrapped solo founders sharing revenue and behind-the-scenes
  • Demand Curve ↗
    Self-promotion allowed, within the community's rules
    Audience: Slack community; tight-knit, pseudo-private peer group
  • Dev Hunt ↗
    Self-promotion allowedFree
  • No Code Founders ↗
    Self-promotion allowed, within the community's rules
    Audience: Slack community; tight-knit, pseudo-private peer group
  • OnlineGeniuses ↗
    Self-promotion allowed, within the community's rules
    Audience: Slack community; tight-knit, pseudo-private peer group
  • Product Makers ↗
    Self-promotion allowed, within the community's rules
    Audience: Slack community; tight-knit, pseudo-private peer group

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Featured on FoxPlug: Riften