Catenaa, Sunday, July 06, 2025-OpenRouter, the AI startup co-founded by former OpenSea CTO Alex Atallah, secured $40 million in seed and Series A funding to accelerate its large language model (LLM) aggregator platform.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with Sequoia and angel investors also participating. The company’s valuation has reached $500 million, according to sources cited by the Wall Street Journal.
OpenRouter offers a routing platform that connects users to hundreds of AI models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
It directs user prompts to the best model based on cost, speed, accuracy, and privacy. Developers pay using credits, while OpenRouter takes a small fee per request, aiming to simplify AI integration amid a fragmented market.
OpenRouter unifies AI stacks with a single API and contract, delivering high uptime.
Founded in 2023, OpenRouter quickly scaled to more than $100 million in annualized inference spending with over one million developers using its API.
The startup integrates with Microsoft VSCode, Zapier, and Cloudflare and partners closely with AI labs such as OpenAI to provide early access to advanced models like GPT-4.1.
