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OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#191

Post by drak0n1c »

bbg2401 wrote: post #180
mmarian wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're BYOK, have you tried self-hosting LiteLLM? It's what I use for the BYOK option on my service.

Good shout, that's what I use. My usage of OpenRouter was limited to casual throwaway experiments with coding agents and quick, surface-level exploration of new and unfamiliar models in the chat interface. My comment is just an expression of a festering grudge over the unannounced, unexplained sanction on my account and the lack of transparency and feedback from the non-existent support team. There's no OpenRouter sh…

If you want to avoid bans, Venice is another good option since their focus is uncensored and privacy. They run models themselves alongside offering OpenRouter-style routing for frontier and niche models - but at least they fully anonymize the user and never ban.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#192

Post by drak0n1c »

codemog wrote: post #103

[flagged]

Venice (uncensored privacy AI API and app co) took a year to expand their self-hosted model selection to routing hundreds of other models. It's harder than it looks to get customers. But they did grow to 3M users and >$50M ARR as of a few weeks ago. So go for it if you've found an easy way to do it.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#193

Post by remexre »

sowbug wrote: post #138
arw0n wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you believe there will be lots of LLM providers in the future, then OpenRouter could be a DoorDash play. Established restaurants didn't need DoorDash because they were already on everyone's speed dial. But new or small restaurants couldn't afford to advertise or maintain a team of delivery people. DoorDash created a two-sided marketplace that made it a lot easier for new entrants to bootstrap. Today even the estab…

not sure that works as well when they don't own their API though; how much software is openrouter-only in a way that's not 5min of deepseek to patch the source for, or 15min of opus to patch the binary instead

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#194

Post by nl »

Aurornis wrote: post #14
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…

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.

OpenRouter explicitly lets you filter by zero-data-retention providers: https://openrouter.ai/models?zdr=true

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#195

Post by laweijfmvo »

humam_alhusaini wrote: post #160
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.

seriously. you don’t raise $100m just to be safe unless you’re bleeding cash or you lied to the investors.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#196

Post by nl »

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…

> Plus, there are no RLHF signals in OpenRouter data. Even if OpenRouter wanted to build a general model-neutral framework for collecting RLHF-type data, it can't force subscriber apps to do the UI-level stuff necessary to collect it (i.e. the things ChatGPT/Claude do, with "thumbs-down" buttons, A/B tested responses, etc.)

The majority of RLHF data doesn't need this. The majority is software development and/or tool calling where the agent gets a signal back as to if it succeeded (eg compilation errors, test errors). It's true that end-of-trajectory signals (eg, did this task do what you wanted) are even more useful but even partial signals are great for RL training.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#197

Post by nl »

derefr wrote: post #47
bix6 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting all the focus on opt-out from training. Sometimes I worry there is an intentional focus on that so people don’t think about the other ways the company might be profiting off our data. Like I pay for Anthropic and they don’t train on that but are they selling my “anonymized” usage data in some other way?

From what I recall, these companies don't offer any option to opt out of your session transcript data being used (and sold!) for "regular" adtech targeting purposes.

Anthropic explicitly state that they don't do this, even if you use the free plan and even if you don't opt-out of letting them use your data for training:

"We do not sell users’ data to third parties."

https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#198

Post by scosman »

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…

They also do a good job working over the little differences between APIs. Tool calling sometimes breaks on major providers, and OR will patch it before the provider does. Libraries like LiteLLM do this too, but OR is faster.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#199

Post by ssivark »

acka wrote: post #91
derac wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend nvidia nim for completely free dev access for young people.

It's free, but not unlimited. Besides rate limits, new sign-ups get 1000 credits (requests), and once those are gone, they're gone for good. Only business accounts might get a couple of free refills.

Is there a way to check/track your available credits?

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#200

Post by Nav_Panel »

humam_alhusaini wrote: post #160
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.

Think about what OpenRouter primarily traffics in and what you can do with that raw material.
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