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OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#151

Post by 01100011 »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

As someone who uses OpenRouter extensively (and wrote an unintentional adjacent PR piece a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317294 ), it's definitely the best way to try out new models without fiddling with each providers distinct APIs which is becoming a recurring concern as of late. That said, I don't understand the people who use something a full agentic backbone with expensive models like Clau…

IDK, but that sounds like something that would be better implemented with an open-source library to which providers supply support patches. Why do I need a company to act as a proxy and not just run a relatively simple shim layer on my machine?

I'm just a stupid systems programmer working in the bowels of AI and I understand there is a lot of seemingly pointless software which exists solely to provide a slight boost to convenience in exchange for money. Is OpenRouter just that? Do they actually host models themselves or centralize billing amongst various providers?

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#153

Post by wahern »

freakynit wrote: post #82

"Over the last six months, weekly volume on OpenRouter has grown from 5 trillion to 25 trillion tokens". DAMN!! That's 41+ million tokens every second. That scale is crazy for such a small team of 48-50 people overall.

Assuming that's token cost upstream, and given the multiplication factor in tokens processed per query, that seems like maybe a few thousand requests per second at most? It's impressive but for a 50 person startup team expending millions per month, that seems about on par.

Would it be as impressive if the context were an email provider accepting thousands of message per second, or even one accepting thousands of messages per second and submitting them upstream for spam detection? The token count might even be higher in that case, but rightly or wrongly I think it would get a yawn on HN.

It says more about how far the industry has come these days in terms of scale on the one hand, but also on the other hand the huge blowup in data and processing for nominally simple requests. Nonetheless I'm sure the team is exceptionally skilled and it's certainly a laudable accomplishment.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#155

Post by JumpCrisscross »

MicrosoftShill wrote: post #120
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models Check out Kagi Ultimate.

Would you recommend Kagi Ultimate over OpenRouter? I'm already a customer of Kagi and would rather give them my money, but only if I'm not really compromising.

> Would you recommend Kagi Ultimate over OpenRouter?

For personal use, yes. The all-in pricing model encourages experimentation. And the privacy pitch seems tighter.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#156

Post by lxgr »

isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #111
rkagerer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents push the full conversation history into context every turn Why? Maybe this is a dumb question, but why wouldn't an agent "keep the conversation going", like I do when interacting with an LLM through a web page? (I understand how it's impractical for long-running tasks where the agent has to wait days for the next input, but assume that's not the majority of use cases)

LLMs are stateless, to predict next tokens they need the history. When you write your own agents you will be very selective and might trim context and heavily segment different tasks, but generic ones don't do that (at best they spawn subjects to handle smaller tasks)

That said, the KV cache is very much not stateless, so internally inference APIs will be highly incentivized to route requests to instances with as much a shared prefix cached as possible.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#157

Post by lxgr »

derefr wrote: post #43
Aurornis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points. The easy experimentation factor is helpful for development, though I would gently encourage everyone to migrate to the 1st party APIs for pricing at scale. OpenRouter is also a good place to find free LLM access with a catch: You should expect that any inputs and outputs are going into someone's training database. Clearly anyone who can pay should be using paid models with privacy protections, but the fr…

> You should expect that any inputs and outputs are going into someone's training database. True enough, in theory; but what exactly are you imagining would be a useful-enough signal in the OpenRouter request+response stream, that any company would want their data as training material? Even a single OpenRouter-API-key-identified subscriber's traffic, may consist of an mixture of traffic from multiple different sessio…

> what exactly are you imagining would be a useful-enough signal in the OpenRouter request+response stream, that any company would want their data as training material?

Isn't this a treasure trove for any model distillation effort?

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#158

Post by drob518 »

Hm. Would be interesting to see the finance spreadsheets for this. Typically the B-round guys are looking for something approaching a 10x return. Can anyone justify OpenRouter being worth $1.1Bn? That seems really high for a “management”/man-in-the-middle play. But sure, AI and all. But I’m old enough to remember when every dot-com was a billion dollar valuation, too.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#159

Post by jampekka »

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…

The main friction reduction, for me at least, is the consolidated billing that avoids extra bureaucracy in corporate environments. The API-translation/abstraction tends to cause more problems than it solves.

I’d prefer something that consolidates billing, but still lets me use providers' APIs directly (or via some "raw HTTP" proxy). There are plenty of unified API gateways, but I haven’t seen one that is just billing/auth in front of the native provider APIs.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#160

Post by humam_alhusaini »

numlocked wrote: post #141

Hi HN! OpenRouter co-founder and COO here. Lots of questions about why we raised! First off: We remain founder-led and founder-controlled, and intend on being here for a long time, creating awesome products for builders all over the world. We are basically a bunch of tinkerers who like building things, and try to make stuff that we would like, when building with AI. Since this is about the raise though, happy to shar…

What will OpenRouter use the $100m for? You say that it "makes the company extremely durable" and is "good validation to employees", but I'd imagine that there are more interesting things to do with 100 million dollars.
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