OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
openrouter.ai
openrouter.ai
1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models.
2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run anything in public it's very useful to have hard limits so it doesn't cost you $1m overnight because someone started abusing it.
3. Their rankings are one of the more interesting signals for which models are popular, despite their flaws (most OpenAI and Anthropic users don't go via OpenRouter, it's currently not possible to tell the difference between many users switching v.s. one "whale" changing their preferred model)
Given how API costs are becoming meaningful for a lot of companies now, having a provider like OpenRouter to help measure your spend and easily experiment with and switch providers feels like a valuable service.
Looks like Vercel even have their own leaderboard: https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/leaderboards/models
Surprising that they have Opus 4.8 and 4.6 listed on the leaderboard but not Opus 4.7.
Other features I've just noticed: - configurable prompt injection protection using OWASP regex (https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/LLM_Prompt_In...) - configurable PIM protection for outbound prompts - input/output logging - "JSON healing" to auto-correct minor hallucinations
Lots of other stuff too. The business model seems pretty simple and the value-add features don't look particularly expensive or difficult to copy.
Free? They take the same 5% fee as OpenRouter does.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway/features/unifie...
OpenRouter is also a good place to find free LLM access with a catch: You should expect that any inputs and outputs are going into someone's training database. Clearly anyone who can pay should be using paid models with privacy protections, but the free models have been great for learning and experimenting. Especially for younger people learning API programming and LLMs who may not have access to a credit card or funds.
"We do not sell users’ data to third parties."
https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms
I.e. nothing about this statement prevents Anthropic from running ads within Claude, as long as they run the ad-placement auctions themselves, and so aren't leaking any of the data they're using to decide which placements are relevant to which users+sessions. (This is the same thing Google does for SERP ad auctions.)
But actually, and perhaps more interestingly, nothing about this statement prevents Anthropic from building a Google AdSense competitor either. Other sites (or mobile apps, etc) could plop in an Anthropic ad iframe; and it'd be Anthropic's knowledge of your interactions with Claude that would drive what ads would show up in that iframe. The embedding site doesn't know what ads the users are seeing, so that's still not "selling users' data to third parties", per se.
True enough, in theory; but what exactly are you imagining would be a useful-enough signal in the OpenRouter request+response stream, that any company would want their data as training material?
Even a single OpenRouter-API-key-identified subscriber's traffic, may consist of an mixture of traffic from multiple different sessions, under potentially multiple different end-users. (Where, if the subscriber is doing security correctly, then their OpenRouter key lives on a gateway rather than in a frontend app; and so the only IP address / UA / etc OpenRouter sees is that of the gateway itself.)
And the traffic stream may also invoke multiple models, and provide multiple different system prompts for those models; which, while marked in the traffic (i.e. conveyed as part of each request), makes the resulting data much less useful in aggregate, than if it were all training data for one model with one system prompt.
Plus, there are no RLHF signals in OpenRouter data. Even if OpenRouter wanted to build a general model-neutral framework for collecting RLHF-type data, it can't force subscriber apps to do the UI-level stuff necessary to collect it (i.e. the things ChatGPT/Claude do, with "thumbs-down" buttons, A/B tested responses, etc.) Analysis would have to rely on pure transcript-level user sentiment extraction.
https://x.com/OpenRouter/status/2041193329270878707
> Privacy:
>
> Private I/O logging and the 1% data sharing discount are separate settings. You control each independently.
>
> Input & Output Logging stores prompts and completions for your use only and makes them visible in your logs. OpenRouter does not access this data. You can configure it in your observability settings.
>
> As always, more in the docs!
https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/broadcast/overvie...
Isn't this a treasure trove for any model distillation effort?
The majority of RLHF data doesn't need this. The majority is software development and/or tool calling where the agent gets a signal back as to if it succeeded (eg compilation errors, test errors). It's true that end-of-trajectory signals (eg, did this task do what you wanted) are even more useful but even partial signals are great for RL training.
Clearly, anyone who needs privacy should be using models with privacy protections. Some people build open source and the models will get the code anyway.
OpenRouter explicitly lets you filter by zero-data-retention providers: https://openrouter.ai/models?zdr=true
> Billing data processing times can be delayed in AI Studio, up to around 10 minutes. You may experience overages beyond your project cap if billing data hasn't processed before more charges are accrued.
https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#project-spend-...
That's a soft cap, not a hard cap
Anthropic: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8977456-how-do-i-pay-... - you can pre-pay and get a hard cutoff.
OpenAI: https://community.openai.com/t/how-to-set-billing-limits-and... - last time I looked OpenAI had a soft but not hard limit, I guess they fixed that last year.
I remember bugging them both about this last year, I need to update my mental model!
Deepseek has a prepaid model. (Pretty impressive, what fits into 10 Dollar)
They don't list themselves on https://openrouter.ai/providers
Why?
Maybe this is a dumb question, but why wouldn't an agent "keep the conversation going", like I do when interacting with an LLM through a web page? (I understand how it's impractical for long-running tasks where the agent has to wait days for the next input, but assume that's not the majority of use cases)
For OpenAI, it seems like you can't prolong the caching duration for money. Duration is longer during off-peak hours for in-memory caching and up to 24 hours for extended prompt caching. https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/prompt-caching
For DeepSeek, caching duration of at least 12 hours (and likely longer) have been observed. Cache writes are free. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/2035737726952194774
Technically it does retrieve the entire history and reevaulate it since the LLM is stateless. Just more ergonomic for the developer.
And prompt caching helps cut the costs down when a conversation drags on.
This is also the reason providers like Anthropic scored lower because while Opus 4.7 is close to 90%, Opus 4.5 is 45%
coffee farmers -> middle man -> you
What's the value proposition for the typical AWS startup to go with openrouter, if Amazon offers similar rates with direct integration into all their other offerings?
The only reason OpenRouter can exist at the moment is because we are in the wild-west phase of this technology, and lots of people and companies are exploring. In 5 years they will have to have transformed their business fundamentally, or go the way of the dinosaurs.
Established restaurants didn't need DoorDash because they were already on everyone's speed dial. But new or small restaurants couldn't afford to advertise or maintain a team of delivery people. DoorDash created a two-sided marketplace that made it a lot easier for new entrants to bootstrap. Today even the established restaurants have to pay them their tithe because hungry people have learned to start with the DoorDash app. A bit of a prisoner's dilemma.
If OpenRouter plays its cards right and gets very lucky, a large number of people will configure their hungry LLM clients to start with OpenRouter, and then LLM providers will have to join the marketplace or else miss out on all those customers.
People could email cat photos and resumes. But Facebook and LinkedIn are where everyone already is, so that's what they use instead.
Everything has a cost of some sort. It's just who you're going to pay and what the currency is.
What if Fireworks stops offering your preferred model?
Check out Kagi Ultimate.
For personal use, yes. The all-in pricing model encourages experimentation. And the privacy pitch seems tighter.
Maybe someday the VM I run agents in will have a dedicated GPU so that I can stop using APIs altogether. One can dream...
The difference between GLM 5.1, ChatGPT 5.4 and Opus don't really matter to me when I'm asking/talking, but programming is a different beast that needs a harness.
I’d prefer something that consolidates billing, but still lets me use providers' APIs directly (or via some "raw HTTP" proxy). There are plenty of unified API gateways, but I haven’t seen one that is just billing/auth in front of the native provider APIs.
(If they were paying me they got a bad deal, since I called out the flaws in their leaderboard approach half way through my post.)
Openrouter is very nice since it puts a barrier between you and those suppliers that were supposed to be like utilities. I got the feeling that if OpenAI was left alone they would be nice as a telco.
OpenAI and Anthropic have already done this.
Mandated BYOK will sink OpenRouter.
If you're doing any kind of production AI work you'll end up with outages caused by calling a single provider, OpenRouter seamlessly switching between providers is a godsend for uptime.
But even more than that there's meaningful cost+speed differences.
Here's Sonnet 4.6 being served direct, via Amazon and via Google
(spoiler: Google was both fastest and cheapest)
First off: We remain founder-led and founder-controlled, and intend on being here for a long time, creating awesome products for builders all over the world. We are basically a bunch of tinkerers who like building things, and try to make stuff that we would like, when building with AI.
Since this is about the raise though, happy to share perspective on it.
We believe that strong companies should have a strong balance sheets. We touch large volumes of spend, and have large spend commits across the ecosystem; having the cash to withstand what may come is a responsible buy-down of risk, and makes the company extremely durable.
It also tells our larger customers and provider partners that we will be able to continue to serve them (and pay our bills) for a long time to come. We don't need venture dollars to continue scaling (indeed the business is healthy) but you know when you don't want to raise $100m? When you really need it!
This is also good validation to employees (current and future) that the value we are creating together is real. We also take seriously our obligation to make a return for anyone who invests; we aren't valuationmaxxing and have the privilege of getting to pick who we work with. I don't think that gets a lot of airtime in the overall start-up world, but I think it's important!
Happy to answer questions and THANK YOU to everyone here who uses OpenRouter, and to everyone who has feedback for how we can improve!
Everyone wants a conspiracy, but what I originally posted is in fact the boring truth. Having a bunch of cash in the bank makes for a durable business!
While I'm at it, another annoyance is that OpenRouter doesn't seem to have a very good API playground. The chat does work, but the params exposed there are quite limited and it's not clear how the GUI fields map to API params. I now have resorted to exporting the chat and figure out the params from the export JSON. Just having an option to get a curl command for the chat call would help a lot, and shouldn't be hard to implement.
Edit: I think the ideal implementation for the direct API access would be that I could generate API keys for the provider at OpenRouter that I would give in the provider API calls, but that would get billed through OpenRouter. Second best would probably be a raw HTTP proxy/tunnel that injects OpenRouter's own keys (or however it is that you call the providers). I don't really know though how you call the providers and what kind of new provider integrations these would require.
Less about the funding and more about the long game: where do you see OpenRouter in 3-5 years, and which product bets are you most excited about right now? Do you guys think with this new raise you'll branch out into other adjacent verticals?
We will inevitably expand into adjacencies because we like building things and experimenting and we have a lot of people with great taste who are likely to ship cool things that customers want to use!
Edit: also - THANK YOU!
Check out the Guardrails section under settings and tell me what’s missing!
That's a nice narrative but I suspect you're not touching upon the investor pressure side of things. Your earlier investors would be upon you to show a multiple in valuation beyond what the balance sheets can show. The only way to do that is to raise more money.
The problem with this is that you're now beholden to another set of investors who will also expect a multiple on their investment which makes increasing valuation your primary objective, even to the detriment of the business. With a margin business you could sustain for a long time even when the market stagnates, but you've lost that option when you first took money from someone. It's an all or nothing play now.
For me, raising $100m when it's not needed doesn't add up. Nobody lends money with the idea to "keep it, just in case". There are always commitments and expectations and obligations to meet those expectations. So when they said they didn't really need to raise, while also not talking about investor expectations, feels there's more to the situation than is being let on.
If a user cancels API access while still holding prepaid credits, that unused balance represents compute they never consumed. Unlike a shipped physical product or a fixed one-time service cost, unused API credit does not seem to impose much marginal cost on OpenRouter to reallocate or refund.
So the issue isn’t whether the policy is disclosed. It’s whether keeping unused prepaid credit after cancellation is the right default, especially when the user is no longer able or willing to use the service.
There is the example of Apple and Google providing transport for push notifications, but claiming to delete the content and only preserve the metadata.
What is Openrouter's policy on this? Is the logging of user data an essential part of the business model, or is the primary business model really facilitating a proxy between multiple services and nothing beyond that? If everything is logged, do y'all store it securely so that if one database is stolen (by China for example) then it's not useful on its own?
With the race for AGI and everyone training on each other's outputs, Openrouter is clearly in a position to abuse all of that even though the major providers weaken their output to limit the value of distilling them.
One mechanism where you get a discount and we can use the data (in theory this does mean sell it; but our intent is to use it to make efficient dynamic routing solutions. But absolutely we could one day sell it) and another where we retain it for you so you can see it in your logs. We have no rights to this data in any way. This is similar to how any tracing/logging solution works.
Both and opt-in. If you don’t opt in, we don’t retain anything and are a pass through with regards to your prompt data.
All of this is carefully documented and I encourage you to explore and chat with the docs.
That said, I don't understand the people who use something a full agentic backbone with expensive models like Claude Opus with OpenRouter because that 5% surcharge is meaningful at that level of cost instead of going with the source API providers. But people are clearly doing it, and it's pure revenue.
Why not... Cursor?
OpenCode is much better at it.
Second, Cursor hasn’t been acquired by SpaceX yet, and there’s a good chance they never will be.
I'm just a stupid systems programmer working in the bowels of AI and I understand there is a lot of seemingly pointless software which exists solely to provide a slight boost to convenience in exchange for money. Is OpenRouter just that? Do they actually host models themselves or centralize billing amongst various providers?
After things begin to settle down, we'll probably see a consolidation of both frontier and open-source models - and then OpenRouter will become less useful, because that 5% overhead is well worth it when you want to try 20 models from 10 labs, but harder to stomach when you only need 5 models from 2 providers, and each of those providers has its own API knobs that you can tune to make things even cheaper.
its just a proxy
The most common counter-argument that I've seen here is " Yes, but no organization wants to manage all of their different operational tools. They would rather just outsource that responsibility to third-party entities".
I'm not sure I fully agree with that counter. Because agents can be viewed as third party entities in some sense. If not today then maybe soon.
So many use cases, like sharing AI/assisted features externally, with the ability to use those features but also limit the fallout if its shared / used for other purposes, without jumping through more fallible hoops like safeguards etc.
Are tech companies FOMOing so hard that they're now all running AI venture arms themselves instead of you know, developing their own products? Except for NVIDIA who needs to keep pumping the bubble I didn't expect the others.
Well, at least for them, investing into AI is actually developing their own product. The push to replace "Actually Indians" [1] with LLMs is huge because large Western companies want to save even the pittances they're paying Indian body shops.
[1] for those OOTL: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1l3rpow/ac...
DAMN!!
That's 41+ million tokens every second. That scale is crazy for such a small team of 48-50 people overall.
Would it be as impressive if the context were an email provider accepting thousands of message per second, or even one accepting thousands of messages per second and submitting them upstream for spam detection? The token count might even be higher in that case, but rightly or wrongly I think it would get a yawn on HN.
It says more about how far the industry has come these days in terms of scale on the one hand, but also on the other hand the huge blowup in data and processing for nominally simple requests. Nonetheless I'm sure the team is exceptionally skilled and it's certainly a laudable accomplishment.
Infrastructure? For proxying requests more infrastructure? You could just pay Cloudflare.
More engineers? But you yourself are the stret seller for the same snake oil that engineers aren't anymore necessary
So what that 100 million dollars are for?
My main job in this conception is to not be in an embarrassing place, and grow my budgets and headcount. Prices rising can even help with this, perversely.
That's a lot of paying users
The handful of times I did try a free model is when I used their chat interface to quickly compare a few open weight models with a single prompt. That's the only usage I can think which could have triggered the block on my account. Even still, what's the point in have the simultaneous chat feature if using it veers so quickly into a ToS violation.
Their support is beyond useless in helping understand the situation. I don't think I managed to speak to anyone other than Tony Bot (or whatever it was named).
Edit:
Total usage over 1 year:
Claude Sonnet 4.6 $8.80
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview $6.71
Claude Opus 4 $6.19
Claude Opus 4.1 $7.49
Gemini 2.5 Pro $10.06
Claude Sonnet 4.5 $12.74
GPT-5 Codex $2.56
Grok 4 $4.39
Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview (Nano Banana) $1.88
GPT-5 $7.30
Others $7.99
My usage of OpenRouter was limited to casual throwaway experiments with coding agents and quick, surface-level exploration of new and unfamiliar models in the chat interface.
My comment is just an expression of a festering grudge over the unannounced, unexplained sanction on my account and the lack of transparency and feedback from the non-existent support team. There's no OpenRouter shaped hole in my personal workflow, fortunately.
I’m a user and I like the routing layer and not having to change things up too much, but I’m not sure why a solid business model for this product would require this much money at this kind of valuation unless they’re trying to buy data center capacity to self-host models eventually?
> While the startup didn’t disclose its new valuation, The New York Times reports that it landed at about $1.3 billion post-money.
Enterprises appear to be paying the API rates which are 10x (1000%) what are available to individuals, so I would not be confident they are sensitive to a 5% price change.
That said, the attraction of OpenRouter to enterprise customers should be that they save you >5% on average for a product <5% worse.
So you think for example you're using Kimi k2.6....but behind the scenes, it's the 4b or 8b quantized versions.
So for open source models, I've started using the providers own service. In the case of Kimi, I don't trust any provider other than moonshot not to quant the model. So far this seems to be getting better results.
If I see a provider not specifiying if they quant or not, I assume that they do.
I'll still use OpenRouter to try new models out, but not for any real work.
I think they should go in this direction: they should make their own Model Agnostic versions of whatever functionalities other AI companies are making. Examples
1. personal chat app
2. the chat app working with their own implementation of memory
3. coding harnesses that are model agnostic
When I think of OpenRouter, I should think of "model agnostic LLM tools".
I'm sure they're experiencing growing pains, but a larger model selection (and faster releases for open weights models), would keep us from using other providers. For example, it took much longer than it should have to get Qwen 3.6 ~30B class models released (almost 2 weeks if I recall)
Also one scary issue I had with OpenRouter in the early days, I think I saw somebody else's context and there were weird Chinese characters, haven't touched it since.
Tokenrouter! (already taken).
Subscribing to a vendor locks you in to sudden price swings that the big 3 are happy to do. The market needs lubrication for competition and provider routers offer that.
The 5% fee is a rounding error for your average small time user, and it makes testing new models as simple as changing one string.
Can spin up separate models for separate budgets too.
It's a really simple product that just works
There are zero guarantees beyond "trust me bro" that the inference provider isn't taking your prompts and selling them to promptbase or one of a dozen other similar services.
Venice claims no logs, which may or may not be true, but what happens to your prompt after they proxy it to the service running the GPUs?
From their website:
"The GPUs that process your inference requests come from multiple decentralized providers, and while each specific provider can see the text of one specific conversation, it never sees your entire history, nor knows your identity."
Which is an absurd claim if your prompt has your company name in it.
It doesn't matter if it is encrypted in transport, once it hits the company running the GPUs, it is open season for them.
Boggles my mind that people are ok with this.
This is entirely transparent. TR is also 100% open source.
It'd be nice if you acknowledged the value of this.
I went to AMD's offices and learned about them from the greybeards that built it.
If you think that's the end all solution, you're wrong. Tip of the iceberg...
https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/a...
I don't know why you keep digging your hole deeper with these sorts of responses.