Stefan Cruceru
Co-founder · Hardware
Designed the appliance from motherboard up. Background in mesh networking and PoE infrastructure.
About Droplet
We're three people in Costa Mesa, building one box.
A hardware engineer, a systems engineer, and a go-to-market lead. One thesis: the AI that runs your home or your business should live in your house, not in someone else's data center.
Where Droplet came from
Three engineers, one frustration in common.
We were all building variants of the same thing — local AI for systems we already owned — and kept hitting the same wall: there was no appliance to put it in.
Hardware
Stefan
Built mesh routers, NVRs and PoE rigs for offices. Watched ops teams pay $200/mo per camera for cloud storage they didn't trust.
Software
Romain
Ran inference platforms at startups. Saw teams send sensitive prompts to vendor APIs for tasks a $2k box could do faster, locally.
Business
Sam
Sold compliance-heavy SaaS to clinics and dealers. Knew an on-prem AI box would close deals SaaS never could.
The team
Three founders, one box.
Romain Jouffret
Co-founder · Software
Owns the model serving, agent gateway and the dashboard you'll use every day.
Samantha Rubinchik
Co-founder · Business
Brand, GTM, and the customers we'll ship to first.
Three things we hold
We're not neutral on where AI should live.
AI belongs where the data is.
Not in someone else's data center.
Tools beat prompts.
A team should never be asked to engineer a prompt again.
A box is a contract.
Owning the hardware is the only way to know what's running.
Boring beats clever.
A button that runs every Monday at 9 is worth more than the smartest demo.
Bring your brain back inside.
We're shipping Droplet to a small number of homes and businesses each month.