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OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#221

Post by cheschire »

potamic wrote: post #213
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…

> 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! That's a nice narrative but I suspect you're not touching upon the investor pressure side of things. Your earlier investors would be upon you to show a multiple in valuation beyond what the balance sheets can show. The only way to do that is to raise more money…

I’m interested what you believe the intent of your message to be. You’re talking to a COO that just raised money as if you’re mentoring someone about to approach VCs for the first time. Hugely patronizing attitudes often just get a pass here on HN, but what is your purpose for using one here?

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#222

Post by rkagerer »

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)

Thanks. If I ran it local, presumably I could keep the state cached forever. Can you "reserve" resources from a frontier provider to guarantee your state stays "hot"? (Analogous to reserving a whole VM instead of a slice)

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#224

Post by gpugreg »

rkagerer wrote: post #222
isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Thanks. If I ran it local, presumably I could keep the state cached forever. Can you "reserve" resources from a frontier provider to guarantee your state stays "hot"? (Analogous to reserving a whole VM instead of a slice)

For Anthropic, 5 minute caching costs 1.25x base input price and 1 hour costs 2x base input price. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing#pro...

For OpenAI, it seems like you can't prolong the caching duration for money. Duration is longer during off-peak hours for in-memory caching and up to 24 hours for extended prompt caching. https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/prompt-caching

For DeepSeek, caching duration of at least 12 hours (and likely longer) have been observed. Cache writes are free. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/2035737726952194774

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#225

Post by wg0 »

svnt wrote: post #182
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?

They are because they can, because it serves as social proof, which convinces their customers that they are doing something of deeper value. Then in reality they will use it to develop channels preparing to use their customers (and the data customers trust them with) as the product in the future.

That signals the reverse that they might jack up prices at any time for their 10x returns for the investors. How does that instil any confidence at all?

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#226

Post by senordevnyc »

827a wrote: post #201
anon7000 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And its own model (Composer 2.5)

Cursor is functionally "one of the big 4 labs" (SpaceX).

First, calling xAI one of the big labs is pretty funny.

Second, Cursor hasn’t been acquired by SpaceX yet, and there’s a good chance they never will be.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#227

Post by scrollop »

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…

Though you pay 5% fees? Not worth it for me with the volume of tokens used.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#228

Post by scrollop »

throw10920 wrote: post #27

I think that OpenRouter will continue to be very popular while there lots of experimentation in the LLM space, and while the "current favorite" model continues to change between various frontier labs. After things begin to settle down, we'll probably see a consolidation of both frontier and open-source models - and then OpenRouter will become less useful, because that 5% overhead is well worth it when you want to try…

Agreed - 5% fees is quite high considering the volumes of tokens involved.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#229

Post by treme »

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…

how come cancelling api keys with left over prepaid credit isn't refunded?

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#230

Post by numlocked »

Something1234 wrote: post #190
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…

The biggest missing feature for me is the differentiation on zero data retention providers and if a model works for the rules I defined. Right now there’s no way to hide the providers who don’t work for the zdr rules

What differentiation are looking for? We have good documentation of every provider and what their data retention stance is, and you can figure allow/blocklists for all providers.

Check out the Guardrails section under settings and tell me what’s missing!

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