OpenRouter more than doubles valuation to $1.3B in a year | TechCrunch

OpenRouter, a unified gateway and API for large language models, raised $113 million in a Series B led by CapitalG. The post-money valuation is reported at about $1.3 billion, up from an estimated $547 million post-money a year earlier after a $40 million Series A. The platform supports enterprises and other AI users by helping select different models for different tasks to manage costs and improve reasoning and accuracy. OpenRouter provides access to 400+ models from multiple providers, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI, and DeepSeek. It reports 8 million global users and 100 trillion tokens processed per month, with a fivefold increase in weekly tokens over six months. The growth reflects a shift toward model choice as an interchangeable engine rather than vendor lock-in.

"OpenRouter, the unified gateway and API for Large Language Models founded in 2023, has raised a hefty $113 million Series B led by CapitalG, the growth venture fund of Google parent company Alphabet. While the startup didn't disclose its new valuation, The New York Times reports that it landed at about $1.3 billion post-money."

"The gateway helps enterprises and other AI users select different models for different jobs to control costs or increase reasoning and accuracy for the task at hand. OpenRouter provides access to over 400 models, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI, and DeepSeek, it says."

"It claims 8 million global users and 100 trillion tokens processed per month, or about 25 trillion per week. That's a 5X increase from the 5 trillion tokens it was processing per week just six months ago. OpenRouter's success means that the AI model is increasingly becoming an invisible, swappable engine for AI tasks."

"Rather than a future where startups or enterprises standardize on a model of choice - perhaps creating a single all-powerful model maker in the process - the growth of OpenRouter indicates something else. Companies have no plans to get locked into a model vendor as they did with their various SaaS providers. The multi-model future is already here."

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