A U.S. startup that enables enterprises to access and deploy different AI models raised $113 million in a Series B funding round, the company said on Thursday.
OpenRouter, which was founded in 2023, is now valued at $1.3 billion — a major jump from its valuation of $547 million following its Series A in June last year, according to The New York Times.
The latest investment was led by CapitalG, the growth fund of Google parent Alphabet, with other participants including NVentures (Nvidia’s venture capital arm), ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Databricks Ventures, alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures.
OpenRouter describes itself as an “AI model exchange,” and broadly works like an aggregation platform, providing an interface that enables enterprises and individual developers to access, route, and optimize across hundreds of AI models through a single API.
More than 400 models are available, including from big names such as Anthropic, xAI, Google and OpenAI, as well as open source offerings from China, including Tencent and DeepSeek.
OpenRouter presents itself as neutral, meaning its “intelligent routing” — to the best option, rather than favored models — provides optimum performance and avoids the pitfalls of vendor lock-in.
In addition, enterprises can monitor costs by enforcing controls such as limiting permissions and access, achieving total visibility into spend, and requesting audit-friendly usage reports — all within a single pane.
The popularity of this approach is underscored by impressive numbers: OpenRouter said it now processes 25 trillion tokens per week, a five-fold increase from the 5 trillion tokens it processed six months ago.
The company says this emphasizes the massive increase in deployment of agents by enterprises, and their desire to scale AI using multiple providers. More than eight million global users now use OpenRouter, including some prominent large enterprises and its usage data is widely accepted as a credible barometer of model adoption, performance and price, according to the vendor.
“Running inference at scale is fundamentally a multi-model problem. The era of picking a single model is over. Success now depends on continuously routing across a changing market,” Alex Atallah, OpenRouter’s CEO and co-founder, said in a statement.
