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OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#141

Post by numlocked »

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 share perspective on it.

We believe that strong companies should have a strong balance sheets. We touch large volumes of spend, and have large spend commits across the ecosystem; having the cash to withstand what may come is a responsible buy-down of risk, and makes the company extremely durable.

It also tells our larger customers and provider partners that we will be able to continue to serve them (and pay our bills) for a long time to come. We don't need venture dollars to continue scaling (indeed the business is healthy) but you know when you don't want to raise $100m? When you really need it!

This is also good validation to employees (current and future) that the value we are creating together is real. We also take seriously our obligation to make a return for anyone who invests; we aren't valuationmaxxing and have the privilege of getting to pick who we work with. I don't think that gets a lot of airtime in the overall start-up world, but I think it's important!

Happy to answer questions and THANK YOU to everyone here who uses OpenRouter, and to everyone who has feedback for how we can improve!

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#142

Post by wg0 »

Do you really need VC money to put a proxy in front of other APIs? For what exactly? Marketing? What exactly you want to maket? You're already known.

Infrastructure? For proxying requests more infrastructure? You could just pay Cloudflare.

More engineers? But you yourself are the stret seller for the same snake oil that engineers aren't anymore necessary

So what that 100 million dollars are for?

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#143

Post by GodelNumbering »

kflansburg wrote: post #119
GodelNumbering wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another neat thing is, they publish hourly caching states for ALL model/provider combinations. I did some research on it to come up with a provider tiers list and found a bunch of open-source 3rd party hosts are simply trash tier https://dirac.run/posts/cache-hit-rates-agents

I would recommend tracking this data over time. I work on Cloudflare's KV cache for Kimi K2.6, and while there are periods where our cache rate is low, we are frequently in the 80-90% range. OpenRouter shows us at 87.3% at the time of this post. We observe cache rates change quite a bit from hour to hour.

True for Kimi, but the results I published are average across the models (CF has over 10 models on openrouter). Your current Kimi K2.6 is over 80% but Gemma 4 26B A4B is 0%. https://openrouter.ai/google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it

This is also the reason providers like Anthropic scored lower because while Opus 4.7 is close to 90%, Opus 4.5 is 45%

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#144

Post by dayone1 »

brianwawok wrote: post #87
kaufmann wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like which one? Most I know don’t have this feature

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#145

Post by sohzm »

wg0 wrote: post #142

Do you really need VC money to put a proxy in front of other APIs? For what exactly? Marketing? What exactly you want to maket? You're already known. Infrastructure? For proxying requests more infrastructure? You could just pay Cloudflare. More engineers? But you yourself are the stret seller for the same snake oil that engineers aren't anymore necessary So what that 100 million dollars are for?

ig this reply by co-founder of openrouter is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340940

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#147

Post by kvirani »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #35
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?

tbh anyone can rig up something like openrouter in a few nights with claude code. its just a proxy

Today your statement is a little too ambitious but I agree with the overall point that the inherent effort based moat in SaaS is mostly gone and now it is really about personalizing your own.

The most common counter-argument that I've seen here is " Yes, but no organization wants to manage all of their different operational tools. They would rather just outsource that responsibility to third-party entities".

I'm not sure I fully agree with that counter. Because agents can be viewed as third party entities in some sense. If not today then maybe soon.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#148

Post by mannanj »

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…

How about protection of intellectual property? Doesn’t have to be patented to be valuable.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#149

Post by asmosoinio »

sailfast wrote: post #96

At what valuation? I’m a user and I like the routing layer and not having to change things up too much, but I’m not sure why a solid business model for this product would require this much money at this kind of valuation unless they’re trying to buy data center capacity to self-host models eventually?

1.3B$ according to NYT, according to Techcrunch:

> While the startup didn’t disclose its new valuation, The New York Times reports that it landed at about $1.3 billion post-money.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#150

Post by malwrar »

I’m still pretty skeptical about OpenRouter. I have a client implemented for them so I can use them with my harnesses, but at the same time that client was generated and tested in an hour or so just like all of the other llm provider clients that I have. Using these services interchangeably by just swapping out clients has so far been working well for me. I think when it comes down to it, the only real inconvenience that they’re solving is where I put my credit card number. Is there something key that I’m missing about this service (besides it being a nexus of attention) that warrants this kind of investment? Or is this truly the bar for starting a successful AI company :P
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