About Charlie Linville
I'm Charlie Linville — an AI engineer and founder based in Denver, Colorado, studying Applied Mathematics, Engineering & Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I build AI systems and the businesses around them.
What I'm working on
I co-founded Updraft Consulting in June 2026, an AI consulting firm with paying clients in mortgage and healthcare staffing. My work there spans both engineering and sales: I architected seven AI workflows for a mortgage brokerage — everything from contract date extraction through refinance targeting — and built a GLBA-aligned data-handling framework that classifies client data by sensitivity and maps each class to an approved processing environment. Regulated industries can't adopt AI without that groundwork, and most consultancies skip it. I also co-lead sales, scoping and pitching engagements to presidents and review committees at firms up to $1B in revenue, and I've run live AI training for 34 professionals — every person surveyed left with a workflow they could actually use, and 83% asked to expand the engagement.
I'm also the founder of Guleki, an app publishing company focused on AI-native mobile experiences. Our first product, Geolocate Me, gives AI assistants real-time location context through a private GPS tracker with Model Context Protocol integration. It's live on both iOS and Android.
Most recently I've been building Sizzle Roasting Software, which runs a coffee roastery end to end — bean inventory and costs, live machine control, and AI roast coaching. It steers the roaster automatically to hit a target temperature curve, predicts how a batch will taste from its roast data, and listens for first crack through a microphone, retraining itself on each machine's own audio. A 47-tool agent built on Strands and LangChain runs local models on an NVIDIA Jetson to keep coaching responses under eight seconds.
Before this
From September 2025 to March 2026 I was co-founder and technical lead at Agori, an early-stage fintech startup. I architected and shipped a real-time quantitative paper trading platform in fourteen weeks using AI-native development workflows, then deployed it for a trading competition run with Old Mission Capital at the University of Michigan. I owned AWS infrastructure, security, developer tooling, and CI/CD, recruited four team members, managed three direct reports, and supported an angel raise while leading product strategy.
Before Agori I consulted for SC Sports, where I built the auction pricing system behind two live deployments — 2,800 lots priced, each converted into a max-bid recommendation against an ROI target, with buyer's fees and bid multipliers encoded for eighteen different auction houses. Earlier, from 2023 to 2024, I worked with Backpack Society, a nonprofit serving more than 70 schools supporting kids in unstable food situations. I architected and pitched a systems overhaul, won funding from the leadership team, rebuilt the organization's website on AWS at 45% lower cost, and advised the board on technology selection and budgeting.
My technical roots go back further than that. From 2020 to 2024 I competed in CyberPatriot, the national cybersecurity competition run by the Air Force Association, leading Cisco networking for my school's team and finishing 12th nationally against more than 5,000 teams.
School and research
I'm pursuing a BS in Applied Mathematics, Engineering & Physics (AMEP) at UW–Madison, graduating in 2028, with coursework in Modern Physics, Numerical Linear Algebra, Mathematical Computing, and Philosophy of AI. I spent the first half of 2026 studying abroad at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Outside of coursework I'm part of the Wisconsin Quantum Computing Club, where I competed in the 2024 IBM Fall Fest hackathon and took home both Community Favorite and First to Finish. I've simulated neutral-atom qubits in QuTiP, built time-dependent Hamiltonians for ground-to-Rydberg drives, and trained a neural network that detects local and non-local errors in a 12-qubit system at 95%+ accuracy. From October 2024 through December 2025 I served as a Member At-Large on the UW–Madison Vice Chancellor for Finance & Administration Study Group, selected through the Associated Students of Madison shared governance process, advising senior university leadership on food security, budget model changes, and renewable energy.
How I work
The thread running through all of it is systems: figuring out how the pieces fit, where the leverage is, and what actually has to be built versus what merely sounds impressive. I lean heavily on AI-native development workflows, which is how a fourteen-week production trading platform was possible at all. I care about shipping things that survive contact with real users and real regulators.
When I'm not building, I'm roasting coffee — which is how Sizzle started — watching Formula 1 for the engineering as much as the racing, training for longevity, and reading.
Common questions
- What does Charlie Linville do?
- Charlie Linville is a co-founder of Updraft Consulting, an AI consulting firm working with clients in mortgage and healthcare staffing, and the founder of Guleki, an app publisher building AI-native mobile products. He also builds AI agents, quantitative trading systems, and security tooling.
- Where is Charlie Linville based?
- Denver, Colorado. He studies Applied Mathematics, Engineering & Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and spent a semester abroad at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
- What is Charlie Linville building right now?
- Updraft Consulting, Guleki, and Sizzle Roasting Software — a platform that runs a coffee roastery end to end with closed-loop machine control and AI roast coaching.
- How can I contact Charlie Linville?
- By email at charlie@benlaura.com, or through LinkedIn, GitHub, or X.