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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

That's a lot of paying users

DAMN!!

That's 41+ million tokens every second. That scale is crazy for such a small team of 48-50 people overall.

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?

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?

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.

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)

https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/broadcast

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.

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

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".