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OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#81

Post by kaufmann »

a13n wrote: post #17
simonw wrote: post #6

It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run anything in public…

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have billing caps… who doesn’t?

I tried Alibaba Cloud. They have no caps. This was the reason to cancel my account there.

Deepseek has a prepaid model. (Pretty impressive, what fits into 10 Dollar)

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#83

Post by zuzululu »

I still don't get the value proposition: You rarely have to use all the models, you will likely end up with a few for your workflow but there is a way to use them/try all if you wanted to, neato.

Also one scary issue I had with OpenRouter in the early days, I think I saw somebody else's context and there were weird Chinese characters, haven't touched it since.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#84

Post by brianwawok »

simonw wrote: post #6

It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run anything in public…

I’m just not sure they have a moat or a long term play? I put $20 in and tried a few models. Then I went right to the model provider to put in $1000 and avoid the middleman tax. Now imagine a big corp spending millions on AI. That’s a lot of middleman tax.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#85

Post by brianwawok »

arw0n wrote: post #78
simonw wrote: post #6

It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run anything in public…

I love their product and use them myself. But where's the value proposition for investors? Unless they get purchased by one of the large cloud providers, they will get pushed out of the market sooner or later. What's the value proposition for the typical AWS startup to go with openrouter, if Amazon offers similar rates with direct integration into all their other offerings? The only reason OpenRouter can exist at the…

Yah I don’t think they have a long term play without a pivot

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#86

Post by omneity »

tom1337 wrote: post #9

Is the Open in OpenRouter the same as in Open AI? I couldn’t find any repository or hosted code. Thought it'd be a open source, self hostable tool with a cloud offering but seems its just the latter?

The Open in OpenRouter is the same as in OpenSea, as it's the same founder. Make of that what you will.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#87

Post by brianwawok »

kaufmann wrote: post #81
a13n wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have billing caps… who doesn’t?

I tried Alibaba Cloud. They have no caps. This was the reason to cancel my account there. Deepseek has a prepaid model. (Pretty impressive, what fits into 10 Dollar)

Literally every credit card I own allows me to make a virtual card that is either single use or has a cap.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#88

Post by ascorbic »

anon7000 wrote: post #72
827a wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor only supports a single model (Kimi K2.5) not made by the Big 4 labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI). Cursor is actually extremely bad at wide model support. OpenCode is much better at it.

And its own model (Composer 2.5)

Which is finetuned Kimi 2.5

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#89

Post by dmurray »

zero-dark wrote: post #54

Congrats to the OpenRouter team for securing this round of funding. The 5% surcharge for their pricing model may not be palatable to enterprises. In fact, the OpenRouter team could be a pivotal part of the enterprise GenAI stack if they can allow configurable, pluggable endpoints for routing directly to enterprise vetted endpoints to 1P/3P LLM APIs. A couple of large companies I’ve worked so far kinda have this syste…

> The 5% surcharge for their pricing model may not be palatable to enterprises

Enterprises appear to be paying the API rates which are 10x (1000%) what are available to individuals, so I would not be confident they are sensitive to a 5% price change.

That said, the attraction of OpenRouter to enterprise customers should be that they save you >5% on average for a product <5% worse.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#90

Post by MillionOClock »

simonw wrote: post #6

It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run anything in public…

Billing caps are underrated! I don't understand why they aren't present everywhere. As an indie dev there are some services I'm really hesitant on trying by fear of getting an enormous bill for a mistake, this is even more true with vibe coding IMO.
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