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OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#91

Post by acka »

derac wrote: post #45
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…

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.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#93

Post by iqihs »

zuzululu wrote: post #83

I still don't get the value proposition: You rarely have to use all the models, you will likely end up with a few for your workflow but there is a way to use them/try all if you wanted to, neato. Also one scary issue I had with OpenRouter in the early days, I think I saw somebody else's context and there were weird Chinese characters, haven't touched it since.

agreed, unless you need to use all models i'm sitting here wondering why orgs would want to introduce third party risk into their pipelines for marginal cost and time savings

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#94

Post by iqihs »

dcreater wrote: post #92

Why does a company with a seemingly health business model that is already churning profits and doesnt require large CapEx, taking losses to capture users, need to be raising this kind of capital?

i wonder if it's partially because it's not a unique business model and subject to yet another VC-subsidized race to the bottom on things like token prices

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#95

Post by brianjking »

brianwawok wrote: post #84
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…

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.

I tend to agree, but there's also a lot of tax to build and maintain the different provider abstractions that OpenRouter eliminates.

Everything has a cost of some sort. It's just who you're going to pay and what the currency is.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#96

Post by sailfast »

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?

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#97

Post by rsalus »

arw0n wrote: post #78
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…

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…

functionally they operate as a marketplace for cloud providers. I feel like there is value there, especially as API costs rise and companies explore cost-saving/efficiency. IMO, this is a particularly attractive value prop in the SMB space, where it is common to interoperate between multiple SaaS/software stacks.

Re: OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

#100

Post by reed1234 »

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…

You get a 1% discount if you give OpenRouter your traces so at least they think there's some (a lot) of value.
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