OpenRouter, led by OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah, has secured $40 million in combined seed and Series A funding.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with Sequoia and several industry angels joining in. According to a Wall Street Journal source, the investment values the company at $500 million.
Rapid Growth and Developer Adoption
Since its launch two years ago, more than one million developers have tapped OpenRouter’s unified interface for large language model inference.
Annual run-rate spend on the platform leapt from $10 million in October 2024 to over $100 million by May 2025. OpenRouter has become the backbone for startups and global firms that need to route mission-critical AI traffic through one hub.
Enterprise-Grade Features
OpenRouter’s offering for larger companies includes zero-logging by default and the option to route requests to providers that meet specific data policies.
The platform supports automatic multi-cloud failover across more than 50 providers to guarantee high uptime. An edge-deployed network adds only about 25 milliseconds of overhead while handling billions of requests and trillions of tokens each week.
A single API covers tool-calling, caching, performance or price preferences. Enterprises get unified billing, real-time spend controls and the ability to blend their own capacity with OpenRouter’s burst pool.
Partnerships and Integrations
OpenRouter has struck deep ties with AI labs and developer tools. It worked with OpenAI on the stealth launch of their GPT 4.1 model, giving early access to customers and feeding back real-world usage data.
The platform also plugs into Microsoft VSCode, Zapier, Cloudflare, Make.com, n8n and PostHog, among others. These integrations have broadened the ecosystem and cemented OpenRouter’s position as a key player in the multi-cloud AI landscape.
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Leadership Vision
Alex Atallah, co-founder and CEO, pointed out that inference costs are the fastest-rising expense for forward-looking companies. He noted that many have built home-grown gateways to manage four or more models, only to find integration hard to maintain.
He said that teams are now ripping out custom solutions in favour of OpenRouter, so they can focus on domain-specific challenges instead of LLM plumbing.
Strategic Diversification Amid NFT Market Shifts
OpenRouter also represents a way for Alex Atallah to broaden his bets beyond NFTs. Earlier this month, Solsniper, a Solana-based NFT platform, shut down its marketplace on June 13, 2025. All NFTs were withdrawn, bids were cancelled, and balances were returned. The team said the platform could not run sustainably.
Meanwhile, Nike is facing a lawsuit from buyers of its crypto assets and Nike-themed NFTs after closing the site that issued them. Investors claim they lost large sums when those digital offerings abruptly ended. By focusing on AI infrastructure, Atallah is building a business less exposed to the volatility and legal risks in the NFT world.
Industry Support
“AI stacks are fragmenting,” said Anjney Midha of Andreessen Horowitz. “OpenRouter unifies them with one API, one contract and top-tier uptime. This is the kind of infrastructure that defines new categories.”
Tabarak Khan from OpenAI praised OpenRouter’s active developer base and collaborative spirit, noting how shared feedback has improved model performance in real use.
With $40 million in fresh capital, OpenRouter plans to speed up product development, add more model types and boost enterprise support. As companies scale their AI efforts, the platform aims to remain the default gateway for LLM inference.
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