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OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#241

Post by Art9681 »

kristianp wrote: post #212
brianwawok wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The value of openrouter isn't as a middleman for users of claude, gemini or chatgpt, it's for those looking to find a model that fills the use case at a lower price than the top 3.

Except the latency is significant and not suitable for clients with advanced agent features. The experience between using a frontier model via first party API and the best open weight models via OpenRouter is night and day. Can't get any real work done with it.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#242

Post by numlocked »

segmondy wrote: post #239
numlocked wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have never sold any prompt data to anyone, in any form, and have no plans to do so. Full stop.

Can you also confirm that you do not log/retain it. 100% pass through. If you are logging it, you could one day change your position on that.

We have two mechanisms whereby we retain data. Both are opt-in and off by default.

One mechanism where you get a discount and we can use the data (in theory this does mean sell it; but our intent is to use it to make efficient dynamic routing solutions. But absolutely we could one day sell it) and another where we retain it for you so you can see it in your logs. We have no rights to this data in any way. This is similar to how any tracing/logging solution works.

Both and opt-in. If you don’t opt in, we don’t retain anything and are a pass through with regards to your prompt data.

All of this is carefully documented and I encourage you to explore and chat with the docs.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#243

Post by numlocked »

tehlike wrote: post #208
laweijfmvo wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

there are companies who raised xxxM$ and never had to touch the money because they were already profitable.

Yep!

Everyone wants a conspiracy, but what I originally posted is in fact the boring truth. Having a bunch of cash in the bank makes for a durable business!

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#244

Post by numlocked »

potamic wrote: post #240
numlocked wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great investors are helpful, not harmful :) You want accountability from smart, experienced partners!

Sure, but only to the means where they see a multiple. And sometimes that be at odds with the fundamental value prop of a business.

By default (and in most cases) investors and operators are aligned. When we diligence our investors, we call companies they worked with where things didn’t go well, and speak to those founders. Understanding how investors operate when it’s not all up-and-to-the-right is important when picking partners!

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#245

Post by numlocked »

treme wrote: post #229
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?

Refund policies are clearly documented in our terms. We actually DO offer refunds within 24hrs of credit purchase, which is significantly more flexible than most companies that operate in a similar way. And we try to use good judgement when there are extenuating circumstances.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#246

Post by numlocked »

pclark wrote: post #163
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…

Are you thinking of hiring any PMs? love your product!

Just sent you a DM on twitter!

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#247

Post by ghrl »

drewnick wrote: post #187
eknkc wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW, the openai responses api has a store parameter and a thread id input. Makes it possible to send a thread id and append a new message, ask for completion. So it feels like keeping the conversation going. Technically it does retrieve the entire history and reevaulate it since the LLM is stateless. Just more ergonomic for the developer. And prompt caching helps cut the costs down when a conversation drags on.

Wow, this is refreshing DX compared to iterating all messages like we did back in '24.

I would disagree. Having all the messages locally and sending them with the request means you can switch inference providers or even models mid-conversation. It also means that the provider doesn't store the entire context, which often contains massive parts of proprietary codebases, secrets and PII and instead the agent harness manages all that. While a simple `continue thread` API field might seem more convenient, the cost is still determined by the input token count and cache rate, so it just abstracts this crucial implementation detail away.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#248

Post by treme »

numlocked wrote: post #245
treme wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Refund policies are clearly documented in our terms. We actually DO offer refunds within 24hrs of credit purchase, which is significantly more flexible than most companies that operate in a similar way. And we try to use good judgement when there are extenuating circumstances.

I understand that the refund policy is documented. But “clearly documented” and “fair to the customer” are separate questions.

If a user cancels API access while still holding prepaid credits, that unused balance represents compute they never consumed. Unlike a shipped physical product or a fixed one-time service cost, unused API credit does not seem to impose much marginal cost on OpenRouter to reallocate or refund.

So the issue isn’t whether the policy is disclosed. It’s whether keeping unused prepaid credit after cancellation is the right default, especially when the user is no longer able or willing to use the service.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#249

Post by derefr »

nl wrote: post #197
derefr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That answers for the "sold" part but not for the "used" part.

I.e. nothing about this statement prevents Anthropic from running ads within Claude, as long as they run the ad-placement auctions themselves, and so aren't leaking any of the data they're using to decide which placements are relevant to which users+sessions. (This is the same thing Google does for SERP ad auctions.)

But actually, and perhaps more interestingly, nothing about this statement prevents Anthropic from building a Google AdSense competitor either. Other sites (or mobile apps, etc) could plop in an Anthropic ad iframe; and it'd be Anthropic's knowledge of your interactions with Claude that would drive what ads would show up in that iframe. The embedding site doesn't know what ads the users are seeing, so that's still not "selling users' data to third parties", per se.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#250

Post by jampekka »

numlocked wrote: post #232
jampekka wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be possible to get "raw" access to the provider APIs, but still keep the consolidated billing? The unified API is great when it works, but it often causes hassle with more exotic use cases and new API features.

Interesting. Will look into it! We are releasing pass through API params soon which might hit the bid, but is a bit different than what you are describing.

API param passthrough will probably help with many of the cases. Things like sampling params and constrained decoding and returning logits tend to be very finicky with the translated params. But the return value translation also makes debugging these harder.

While I'm at it, another annoyance is that OpenRouter doesn't seem to have a very good API playground. The chat does work, but the params exposed there are quite limited and it's not clear how the GUI fields map to API params. I now have resorted to exporting the chat and figure out the params from the export JSON. Just having an option to get a curl command for the chat call would help a lot, and shouldn't be hard to implement.

Edit: I think the ideal implementation for the direct API access would be that I could generate API keys for the provider at OpenRouter that I would give in the provider API calls, but that would get billed through OpenRouter. Second best would probably be a raw HTTP proxy/tunnel that injects OpenRouter's own keys (or however it is that you call the providers). I don't really know though how you call the providers and what kind of new provider integrations these would require.

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