OpenRouter is an AI model marketplace and inference gateway that abstracts away the fragmentation of the LLM provider landscape. Developers integrate once against an OpenAI-compatible API and gain access to hundreds of models from dozens of vendors, with OpenRouter handling routing, failover, and billing through a single credits-based account.
The platform emphasizes higher availability via distributed infrastructure with automatic provider failover, price optimization across redundant providers, edge-based latency reduction, and configurable data policies that let teams control where their prompts are sent. This neutral-broker positioning lets apps switch or blend models without rewriting integrations.
OpenRouter was founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah, previously co-founder and CTO of OpenSea, alongside co-founder Louis Vichy. The company has scaled to more than 8 million users and 250,000+ applications, routing on the order of 100 trillion tokens per month.
In May 2026 OpenRouter closed a $113M Series B led by CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund) at roughly a $1.3B valuation, with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA), ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Databricks Ventures, plus returning investors Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures. Its earlier Series A was led by a16z and Menlo Ventures with Sequoia participating.
As the default routing layer for a large share of AI applications, OpenRouter sits at the center of the multi-model AI infrastructure stack.