The first LLM marketplace (2023) and now the largest AI gateway: a unified interface for 400+ models from 70+ providers (100T tokens/month, 10M+ users).
OpenRouter, Inc. is an American startup headquartered in New York, founded in early 2023 by Alex Atallah (previously co-founder and CTO of OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace). The company launched the first LLM marketplace, unifying access to language models from various providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, xAI, Cohere, Together, Fireworks, Groq, Cerebras and more) behind a single OpenAI-compatible API. As of June 2026 the platform serves 100 trillion tokens per month, 10M+ users, 400+ models and 70+ inference providers. The main value propositions: eliminating vendor lock-in, automatic failover between providers, better pricing through aggregated demand, and OpenRouter Fusion (per-query routing-mixing). The company is private, funded by two VC rounds: $40M Series A in 2024 (a16z, Menlo Ventures, Sequoia Capital) and $113M Series B on May 26, 2026 led by CapitalG (Alphabet's investment arm) — a total of $153M+. Business model: a per-token margin (typically 5%) added on top of providers' raw prices.
Founders
Previously co-founder and CTO of OpenSea (2017-2023) — the largest NFT marketplace. After leaving OpenSea he founded OpenRouter in early 2023 as the first LLM marketplace, transferring the 'gateway / aggregator' model from NFT markets to the AI model market.
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