OpenRouter Secures $40 Million to Enhance AI Model Routing Platform

OpenRouter, co-founded by former OpenSea CTO Alex Atallah, has successfully raised $40 million to enhance its AI aggregator—a service designed to offer routing tools for large language models (LLMs).

The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sequoia and several well-known industry angel investors. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company’s valuation stands at $500 million.

OpenRouter functions as a routing platform for LLMs, granting access to a multitude of AI models from various developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. It automatically directs user queries to the most suitable model based on criteria such as cost, speed, accuracy, and privacy requirements.

The company unifies the AI stack through a single API and contract, as explained by Andreessen Horowitz general partner, Anjey Midha.

OpenRouter charges a fee for each user query.

“Inference is rapidly becoming the biggest expense for forward-thinking companies, often requiring the use of four or more different models. While innovative firms have grappled with these challenges and developed their own internal gateways, they are realizing that making LLMs ‘just work’ is not as straightforward as it seems. Many are abandoning their homemade solutions in favor of OpenRouter so they can concentrate on their application goals rather than on integrating large language models,” stated Atallah, the company’s CEO.

The OpenRouter API claims to serve over one million developers.

Atallah co-founded OpenSea in 2018 alongside Devin Finzer but left the NFT space in 2022 to «create something from scratch.»

It’s worth noting that in February, OpenSea developers unveiled a beta version of a new protocol and announced an upcoming distribution of SEA tokens.