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The Open Layer: How Open Models, Routing, and Inference Are Reshaping Agentic Engineering

Scott Breitenother Scott Breitenother | Co-Founder & CEO | Kilo Code
Chris Clark Chris Clark | Co-Founder & COO | Open Router
Mark McQuade Mark McQuade | Founder & CEO | Acree.ai
Dima Dzhulgakov Dima Dzhulgakov | Co-Founder & CTO | Fireworks AI

Closed frontier models get the headlines, but the agentic revolution is being built on something more flexible and more interesting: a hybrid stack of open-weight models, intelligent routing, and high-throughput inference infrastructure. In this panel, founders building the open AI ecosystem — from fine-tuned model deployment to multi-model orchestration to optimized routing and serving — get into what "open" actually means in 2026, and where it falls short.

We'll dig into the real engineering tradeoffs: when open models win in agentic pipelines, when they don't, how routing and inference choices shape latency and cost at scale, and what it takes to build reliable agents in this open ecosystem as always-on agents become an increasingly core part of agentic engineering.
Scott Breitenother
Scott Breitenother
Co-Founder & CEO | Kilo Code

Scott Breitenother is the co-founder and CEO of Kilo, the fastest growing open source coding agent. Prior to Kilo, Scott founded Brooklyn Data Co., a consultancy offering full-stack data and analytics strategy and implementation. Scott started the company in his Brooklyn apartment and grew it to a 100+ person team working with Fortune 500 clients, before selling the company to Velir, a digital marketing agency. He was employee #16 at direct-to-consumer mattress startup Casper and founded the company’s industry-leading Data & Analytics team. In a former life, Scott was a Management Consultant at L.E.K. Consulting (which is probably where he developed his love of frameworks and structure). He has a BS in Business Management from Babson College and a MSc in International Management from London School of Economics.

Chris Clark
Chris Clark
Co-Founder & COO | Open Router

Chris Clark is COO, co-founder and board director at OpenRouter, where he works on product strategy, business development & partnerships, finance, and marketing.

Prior to OpenRouter, Chris was founder, board member, and CTO at Grove Collaborative (NYSE: $GROV), a leading sustainable consumer goods ecommerce company. Chris led Grove through major milestones from an early-stage venture-backed startup through IPO on the NewYork Stock Exchange in 2022.

He lives in Charleston, SC with his wife and children.

Mark McQuade
Mark McQuade
Founder & CEO | Acree.ai

Bio Coming Soon

Dima Dzhulgakov
Dima Dzhulgakov
Co-Founder & CTO | Fireworks AI

Bio Coming Soon