LLM-aggregator raised $40 million

OpenRouter, led by former OpenSea CTO Alex Atallah, has raised $40 million to develop an AI aggregator — a service that offers a routing tool for LLM.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures with participation from Sequoia and well-known industry angels. The firm’s valuation reached $500 million, The Wall Street Journal learned.

OpenRouter acts as a routing platform for LLM. It has access to hundreds of AI models from various developers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and automatically directs user requests to the most suitable one based on cost, speed, accuracy, and privacy requirements.

The company integrates the AI stack through a single API and contract, explained general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, Andzhey Mitha.

OpenRouter charges a fee for each request

“Withdrawal is the fastest-growing expense item for future-oriented companies, and it is often carried out through four or more different models. Advanced firms have already faced these challenges and created their own internal gateways. But they are beginning to realize that making LLM ‘just work’ is not the simplest task. They are abandoning homemade solutions and switching to OpenRouter to focus on their application goals rather than on integrating large language models,” noted the CEO of Atalla.

The OpenRouter API is used by over a million developers, claims the startup.

Atalla co-founded OpenSea with Devin Finzer in 2018, but left the NFT market in 2022 to “build something from scratch”.

Let us remind you that in February, the developers of OpenSea introduced the beta version of a new protocol and announced an upcoming distribution of SEA tokens.