OpenRouter Secures $40 Million for AI Aggregator Expansion

OpenRouter, founded by former OpenSea CTO Alex Atallah, has raised $40 million to advance its AI aggregator—a service offering routing tools for LLM.

The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sequoia and notable industry angels. The firm was valued at $500 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.

OpenRouter serves as a routing platform for LLMs. It accesses hundreds of AI models from various developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, automatically directing user requests to the most suitable model based on cost, speed, accuracy, and privacy requirements.

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

OpenRouter charges a fee for each request.

“Inference is the fastest-growing expense for forward-looking companies, often involving four or more different models. Advanced firms have already encountered these issues and created some internal gateways. However, they are beginning to realize that making LLMs ‘just work’ is not the simplest task. They are moving away from homemade solutions to OpenRouter to focus on their application goals rather than integrating large language models,” noted the company’s CEO Atallah.

The OpenRouter API is used by over a million developers, claims the startup.

Atallah co-founded OpenSea with Devin Finzer in 2018 but left the NFT marketplace in 2022 to “build something from scratch.”

In February, OpenSea developers introduced a beta version of a new protocol and announced an upcoming SEA token airdrop.