TL;DR
- OpenRouter, co-founded by former OpenSea CTO Alex Atallah, has raised $40 million to strengthen its infrastructure for routing AI models.
- Backed by investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Sequoia, the platform is now valued at $500 million.
- The startup serves over one million developers and offers seamless access to LLMs from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and others, helping both startups and enterprises simplify AI integration.
Founded in 2023, OpenRouter is betting on the next major phase of artificial intelligence: interoperability. While AI providers compete over accuracy and innovation, developers and companies are often left to stitch together multiple APIs, contracts, and billing systems to make models work together. OpenRouter changes that dynamic by functioning as a streamlined access point to dozens of leading and emerging LLMs (large language models) through a single contract and interface.
Alex Atallah, known for co-founding the NFT giant OpenSea, stepped away from the platform in 2022 and began building OpenRouter alongside Louis Vichy. Their vision: to fix the inefficiencies they saw emerging in AI, just as crypto was facing its own post-boom recalibration.
Enterprise Adoption Signals Demand Shift
Atallah says enterprise clients are already shifting away from their own patched-together inference systems.
“They want reliability, compliance, and speed,” he explained.
OpenRouter now supports integrations with tools like Microsoft VSCode, Zapier, and Cloudflare, and has grown from $10 million to over $100 million in annualized inference spend within a year.
The $40 million raised—across Seed and Series A rounds—will be used to expand support, develop features for more robust enterprise use, and add new LLMs to its routing ecosystem. The round included angel investors with experience in both AI and crypto, reinforcing the company’s dual focus on decentralization and technical performance.
Crypto Roots Meet AI Scale
Though OpenRouter doesn’t directly touch tokens or blockchain infrastructure, its founding DNA is undeniably crypto-native. The principles of decentralization, transparency, and composability echo throughout its model-agnostic framework. By positioning itself as neutral middleware, OpenRouter is definitely creating something rare in both the AI and crypto worlds: a platform that plays well with everyone while still scaling aggressively.
Atallah emphasized that innovation should not require trade-offs between privacy, speed, or access.
“We want developers to focus on what they’re building, not which model to choose or how to optimize costs. That complexity should be invisible,” he said.
The platform also plans to release governance tools to enhance transparency in how routing decisions are made, while continuing to push for open access to frontier AI technologies and developer-first infrastructure standards.
