Your Showcase Primer: Conduit, Tasklet, Openrouter, Eigen

Reimagining the relationship between people and software.

🌟 Engineers — want to meet these three founders and more? Apply to attend our May 20th SF Startup Showcase.

AI is rewriting how humans interact with software, work, and even each other. Conduit is building an interface for direct brain-to-computer communication. Tasklet is replacing brittle SaaS workflows with autonomous agents. OpenRouter is building a routing layer for the exploding universe of AI models. And Eigen is building AI to strengthen human relationships instead of replacing them. Together, they are reimagining a future where AI more seamlessly integrates with everyday life.

Rio Popper, founder of Conduit Intelligence

For all the advances AI has made over the past few years, the way we interact with computers has hardly changed. We type on keyboards and tap touchscreens. At the leading edge, there’s speech-to-text and autocomplete, but none of it can match the speed of thought.

Rio Popper, founder of Conduit, believes that bottleneck is limiting human potential. After becoming blind at age five, she learned to navigate technology differently from everyone else. She built a motion sensing interface to join the swim team, and went on to create an unusually high-speed workflow for coding. With this tool, she found herself coding faster than many sighted engineers. These experiences made her realize how outdated modern interfaces really are.

Conduit grew from this realization – it’s a radically different interface where software operates at the speed of thought. The company is developing non-invasive neural interfaces that allow AI systems to interpret neural signals directly and translate them into action. At the foundation of the project is over 10k hours of data from thousands of unique individuals, comprising the largest neuro-language dataset in the world. Early prototypes can already infer rough semantic meaning directly from neural signals.

Meet Rio at the showcase to learn more about creating neural interfaces for the AI era.

Andrew Lee, Founder of Tasklet

AI chatbots can answer questions and generate text, but unfortunately they don’t actually do your work for you. You’re still manually tipping every other domino in a disjointed Rube Goldberg machine of SaaS apps. Today, most people spend hours every day copying information across apps, updating CRMs, triaging emails, and stitching together workflows that should be automated. Traditional automation tools have cut some of this, but they require brittle flowcharts and constant maintenance over new edge cases.

Tasklet is the alternative. Andrew Lee built it as an AI agent that connects every tool you use and actually do the work. Tasklet operates as a cloud-native AI agent that can take real action across the tools people already use. It connects through thousands of integrations, APIs, MCP servers, or even a full browser. It can generate interfaces, write and execute code, process data, and run workflows continuously in the background. The best part is how simple the interface is. It feels like typing into a basic LLM chat box, but behind the scenes it’s actually running workflows and taking actions. Knowledge work is shifting away from humans operating software to agents doing it for them, and Tasklet is emerging as the operating system to coordinate it.

If you’re interested in building the operating system for the future of work, come meet Andrew at the showcase!

Alex Atallah, founder of OpenRouter

In the words of Alex Atallah, there’s been “a Cambrian explosion of models,” and with the boom comes a constantly shifting optimization problem. There is a new release every week from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, DeepSeek, Mistral, and open-source variants, each with different pricing, latency, reliability, and infrastructure requirements. There is no ‘best’ model for every task and regular updates make choosing one even harder. A model that’s cheapest today may be obsolete next month. One provider might be fastest for simple queries but comparatively fail on reasoning. Another may offer better privacy but higher latency. As inference costs become one of the largest operating expenses for AI-native companies, developers are spending increasing amounts of time building routing logic, benchmarking providers, and continuously reevaluating which models to use.

OpenRouter is solving the optimization problem by becoming the universal routing layer for AI. It eliminates the need for developers to hardcode themselves to a single model provider, giving developers a single API endpoint connected to hundreds of models and dozens of infrastructure providers. It intelligently routes requests based on price, speed, reliability, or performance requirements, connecting you with the right model, for the right query, at the right time. OpenRouter aims to become a sort of AWS for inference traffic – a neutral marketplace between applications and the universe of base models.

Meet Alex at the showcase for a chance to build the universal API for the AI era!

Paul Scherer, Founder of Eigen

Social media apps designed to bring people together now feel flooded with algorithmic recommendations and push engagement over genuine connection. AI companion apps and personal chatbots threaten to accelerate this fragmentation further, offering a substitute for friendship rather than strengthening your real ones. Most companies are racing to build “your AI best friend,” without thinking about the collective experiences that make us human.

Paul Scherer at Eigen is trying to build the alternative. For him, the goal is to create shared experiences that bring people together rather than silo them. He’s creating “the world’s mutual friend.” Imagine you’ve just moved into an apartment and are looking for furniture. Your ‘mutual friend’ gives you more than generic aesthetic advice. It’ll connect you with your friend that it knows is also going furniture shopping today. Looking for ways to publicize a showcase? Instead of GPT-esque bullet points on ‘when to start promotion’ or ‘what graphics to use,’ your mutual friend reaches out to your founder friend who’s already hosted ten and comes back with a real opinion. Eigen imagines technology that nudges people toward shared discovery, introduces friends-of-friends, encourages collaborative experiences, and helps people feel more connected to the communities around them. It’s an AI that understands not just information, but your relationships, trust, and taste. In a world increasingly shaped by algorithmic isolation, Eigen is betting there’s enormous demand for technology that helps people belong and grow together instead.

If building technology that makes people feel more connected sounds like your vibe, come meet Paul at the showcase!

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