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OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#251

Post by matja »

jampekka wrote: post #164
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…

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.

+1 this. Example: Using Mistral TTS voice cloning appears to be not possible via the "providers" pass-through object in the OpenRouter API because some parameters are always forwarded which conflict with the provider's parameters.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#252

Post by yencabulator »

remexre wrote: post #193
sowbug wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Everyone (except Anthropic) seems to be settling on the same API, so nobody "owns it" anymore. I expect there to be practically no software that's OpenRouter-only.

https://openresponses.org/

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#253

Post by yencabulator »

fontain wrote: post #12
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…

Out of interest, why OpenRouter over a free option like Cloudflare’s AI gateway or another paid option like Vercel’s — any specific benefit to OpenRouter you’ve found, or just first you used that’s good enough?

> a free option like Cloudflare’s AI gateway

Free? They take the same 5% fee as OpenRouter does.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway/features/unifie...

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#254

Post by yencabulator »

furyofantares wrote: post #8
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…

Better uptime? Given it will be routed to one of Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Claude Platform on AWS, Google Vertex (Europe) or Google Vertex

That seems also very possible to do in a client library. (Though that would benefit from an across-my-nodes gossip of backend statuses.)

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#255

Post by sowbug »

remexre wrote: post #193
sowbug wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree that technical lock-in wouldn't cause the consolidation. Instead, if it happened, it would be because of the network effects of the two-sided platform.

People could email cat photos and resumes. But Facebook and LinkedIn are where everyone already is, so that's what they use instead.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#256

Post by ljlolel »

latchkey wrote: post #176
ljlolel wrote: post #75

I’m offering a fully end to end encrypted open source version and hosted version of open router : https://trustedrouter.com/

I'm reading the website and nothing about this addresses the compute running the models. If that's going to a third party (just like openrouter is), then there are no guarantees, other than words on paper.

it's here: https://trustedrouter.com/providers

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#257

Post by latchkey »

ljlolel wrote: post #256
latchkey wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reading the website and nothing about this addresses the compute running the models. If that's going to a third party (just like openrouter is), then there are no guarantees, other than words on paper.

it's here: https://trustedrouter.com/providers

Proving my point. Your prompt gets sent through TR, to another provider on the other end.

There are zero guarantees beyond "trust me bro" that the inference provider isn't taking your prompts and selling them to promptbase or one of a dozen other similar services.

Venice claims no logs, which may or may not be true, but what happens to your prompt after they proxy it to the service running the GPUs?

From their website:

"The GPUs that process your inference requests come from multiple decentralized providers, and while each specific provider can see the text of one specific conversation, it never sees your entire history, nor knows your identity."

Which is an absurd claim if your prompt has your company name in it.

It doesn't matter if it is encrypted in transport, once it hits the company running the GPUs, it is open season for them.

Boggles my mind that people are ok with this.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#258

Post by Something1234 »

numlocked wrote: post #230
Something1234 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I’m specifically looking for it on the model page before I click into it if there’s any valid provider for it

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#259

Post by siva7 »

a13n wrote: post #17
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…

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have billing caps… who doesn’t?

Who doesn't have hard billing caps for inference? Microsoft, Google and AWS my friend. And you know who uses Microsoft, Google and AWS? Almost all big corporations do use them instead of direct OAI or Anthropic API because all their contracts and infra are built around the big cloud providers.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#260

Post by ljlolel »

latchkey wrote: post #257
ljlolel wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's here: https://trustedrouter.com/providers

Proving my point. Your prompt gets sent through TR, to another provider on the other end. There are zero guarantees beyond "trust me bro" that the inference provider isn't taking your prompts and selling them to promptbase or one of a dozen other similar services. Venice claims no logs, which may or may not be true, but what happens to your prompt after they proxy it to the service running the GPUs? From their websit…

TR is end to end encrypted to the provider, and we offer providers like Tinfoil that are also end to end that we also attested using Secure Enclaves. OpenRouter doesn't provide that guarantee.

This is entirely transparent. TR is also 100% open source.

It'd be nice if you acknowledged the value of this.

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