Peter Steinberger

OpenClaw passed 160,000 GitHub stars in about two weeks. Steinberger was running it essentially alone, six to ten Codex agents going at once, each on its own checkout of the repository, everything committed straight to main.¹

Peter Steinberger is a software engineer who founded PSPDFKit, a document-processing SDK company for mobile and web apps, and later created OpenClaw, an open-source personal AI agent that runs on a user's own computer rather than in the cloud. He built PSPDFKit into infrastructure inside hundreds of millions of devices before stepping away, then returned years later with OpenClaw.

Background

Steinberger was born in 1986 and grew up on farmland in rural Austria, with no technology scene and no exposure to startups. He became fixated on computers around age 14, after a summer houseguest showed him a PC, well before any career plan attached to it.

He studied computer science, with a medical-computing emphasis, at the Vienna University of Technology, where as a student he launched the university's first course on Mac and iOS development and tutored others on Apple's platforms for roughly two years, well before Apple's tools had institutional support in Austria.

Getting started

After university, Steinberger worked briefly as a senior iOS engineer, including a Silicon Valley stint, before returning to Austria. PSPDFKit came out of a personal problem: iOS had no workable way to render and manipulate PDF documents inside an app. He built a general-purpose PDF rendering framework and licensed it to other iOS developers hitting the same wall.

He founded PSPDFKit around 2010, bootstrapped with no outside capital. Martin Schürrer joined as a co-founder to build out the toolkit, and the two ran the company from Vienna. A third co-founder, Jonathan Rhyne, a lawyer who had represented developer clients, joined after meeting the pair at a conference and left legal practice to run the business from the US while technical work stayed in Austria.

What he built

PSPDFKit grew from an iOS-only PDF library into a cross-platform SDK spanning iOS, Android, web, Flutter, and React Native, covering viewing, editing, annotation, e-signing, and collaboration. It grew almost entirely through word of mouth, and its customers eventually included Dropbox, DocuSign, SAP, IBM, and Volkswagen, alongside components inside products from Apple, Adobe, and Disney. By 2021 it reached close to a billion end users across roughly 150 countries, funded entirely from bootstrapped profits for more than a decade.

In October 2021, PSPDFKit took its first outside capital: over 100 million euros from Insight Partners to fund growth and acquisitions. Steinberger and Schürrer stepped back into advisory and equity roles while Rhyne continued as CEO, marking Steinberger's exit from founder life after roughly thirteen years.

A period away from the industry followed. Steinberger has described the weight of CEO duties, board meetings, and founder conflict as having drained his motivation, and he spent time out of tech, including in Madrid, before returning to building through dozens of unnoticed side projects, coding as a hobbyist experimenting with large language models.

In November 2025 he began building an AI agent to run locally, reasoning that a cloud-hosted assistant can only act on what a user shares with it, while a local agent can reach every file, device, and forgotten history already on the machine. The project passed through several names before settling on OpenClaw.¹

How he operates

Steinberger's single-branch discipline, committing everything to main rather than to git branches, keeps the codebase shippable and skips merge overhead. He avoids native Model Context Protocol support, instead using a tool called MakePorter to convert integrations into command-line tools, since agents work comfortably in a Unix-style environment and need no restart.¹

He keeps one file inside the otherwise open-source project closed: soul.md, encoding his agent's personality, an idea drawn from research on character trained into a model's weights. He believes the local-versus-cloud choice will determine which software survives an agent-first shift, and that apps whose only job is storing data will be replaced by an agent doing it conversationally.¹ The mode is solo and tool-assembling: a company's worth of work run through one person's judgment and a fleet of agents.

He has also become a public voice on how AI agent loops should be structured, usually by deflating them. Where Claude Code creator Boris Cherny said "My job is to write loops," Steinberger answered with the wry reduction "Cronjobs have funny re-branding rn," his point being that the novel-seeming pattern was a scheduled job with a decision-making model in the body.²

Where things stand

As of mid-2026, PSPDFKit continues under Jonathan Rhyne's leadership, with Steinberger holding an advisory and equity stake rather than a day-to-day role. OpenClaw went from a solo side project to one of the fastest-growing open-source repositories of its release window, and has since been adopted as infrastructure inside enterprise deployments building agent-based virtual employees. In February 2026, Steinberger joined OpenAI to work on personal AI agents, citing a desire for more compute than he could sustain alone, moving OpenClaw under an independent open-source foundation.¹

Key facts

• Founded PSPDFKit around 2010, bootstrapping it without outside capital for more than a decade.
• By 2021, PSPDFKit reached close to a billion end users across about 150 countries, inside products from Dropbox, DocuSign, SAP, IBM, Volkswagen, Apple, Adobe, and Disney.
• Took its first and only outside investment in October 2021: over 100 million euros from Insight Partners, at which point Steinberger stepped back into an advisory role.
• Began building OpenClaw in November 2025; it passed 160,000 GitHub stars within two weeks of release.
• Runs OpenClaw largely alone, across six to ten parallel Codex sessions on separate checkouts, all committed to a single main branch.
• Joined OpenAI in February 2026 for personal AI agents, moving OpenClaw's stewardship to an independent open-source foundation.