OpenRouter: Funding Rounds, Investors & CEO

About OpenRouter

OpenRouter sells one API that lets developers and companies use more than 500 AI models from over 80 providers. Customers buy credits once and can spend them on any model. OpenRouter picks a provider for each request based on price, speed and uptime, and switches to another when one goes down.

OpenRouter started in early 2023 and runs its service from New York. CEO Alex Atallah, a co-founder of OpenSea, founded it with Louis Vichy, and Chris Clark is chief operating officer. OpenRouter has more than 10 million users and handles over 700 trillion tokens a month. According to Stripe, NVIDIA, Zoom and Lovable use it. In August 2026, Stripe agreed to buy OpenRouter.

Funding Rounds (SEC Form D)

First sale	Filed with SEC	Amount sold	Investors	Avg. check	Terms	Filing
Mar 26, 2026	Jul 6, 2026	$113,470,700of $117.0M target	20	$5.6M	EquityRule 506(b)	Form D ↗
May 27, 2025	Aug 25, 2025	$29,606,894of $47.6M target	30	$986K	EquityRule 506(b)	Form D ↗
Total, two offerings		$143,077,594

First sale is the date the first investor in the offering committed to invest. Companies must file Form D within 15 days of that date, so filing dates run later.

Rounds announced by OpenRouter

What the company said publicly about its funding. Announced amounts can differ from Form D figures: an announcement can combine several closings, and some money is raised without a Form D.

Announced	Round	Amount	Investors	Source
May 26, 2026	Series B	$113M	CapitalG (lead), NVentures, ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Ventures, AMP PBC, Pace Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures	openrouter.ai ↗ Press release ↗ CapitalG ↗
Jun 25, 2025	Seed and Series A	$40M	Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures (co-leads), Sequoia	Press release ↗ Menlo Ventures ↗ Andreessen Horowitz ↗

Why Investors Backed OpenRouter

Investors backed OpenRouter for a simple reason. AI apps now mix many models, and OpenRouter lets developers reach more than 500 of them through one API. Weekly usage grew fivefold in the six months before CapitalG led its $113 million Series B in May 2026. Three months later, Stripe agreed to buy OpenRouter for about $7.5 billion, according to The New York Times.

The problem it targets

AI apps rarely rely on a single model anymore. Each provider has its own API, prices change often, and models go offline. In 2025, CEO Alex Atallah called inference “the fastest-growing cost for forward-looking companies,” often spread across four or more models. Anjney Midha of Andreessen Horowitz compared building with these models to “using electricity in the 1890s, before reliable power grids.” The most advanced companies built gateways of their own, Atallah said. Now, he added, they are replacing them with OpenRouter.

What the product does

OpenRouter gives developers one API that works like OpenAI's and reaches more than 500 models from over 80 providers. If one provider goes down, it sends the request to another. OpenRouter passes through model prices without a markup. Instead, it charges a fee on credit purchases: 5.5% on its standard plan and 8% on its business plan. Paid plans add spending limits and data rules, and higher tiers can keep traffic inside the US or the EU. Its public rankings also show which models developers actually use. CapitalG called them “the industry standard for tracking AI model usage.”

Progress so far

The growth figures come from OpenRouter itself. Customer spending on inference through the platform ran at $10 million a year in October 2024. By May 2025, that run rate had passed $100 million. Weekly volume then grew from 5 trillion to 25 trillion tokens in the six months before May 2026. By August 2026, OpenRouter handled more than 10 trillion tokens a day for over 10 million developers and companies. Stripe says NVIDIA, Zoom and Lovable use the service.

Who backs it

Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures co-led a combined $40 million seed and Series A in June 2025, and Sequoia joined. In May 2026, CapitalG, Alphabet's growth fund, led the $113 million Series B. NVIDIA's NVentures and the venture arms of ServiceNow, MongoDB, Snowflake and Databricks also invested. The New York Times put the valuation at about $1.3 billion. CapitalG expects finance chiefs to start trimming inference bills, and it called OpenRouter "the system of record for inference." Midha sits on the board, according to a16z. Menlo partner Matt Murphy is also a director.

How the market is moving

Model routing turned into a crowded field in 2026. Stripe agreed to buy OpenRouter on August 19, after reportedly outbidding Databricks, TechCrunch wrote. Fortune named rivals such as Not Diamond, which picks a model for each request, and LiteLLM, which companies run on their own. Salesforce and Databricks are also adding routing to their own platforms. In October, newer rival TrustedRouter raised a $6 million seed round led by Sierra Ventures, Semafor reported. Other neutral AI platforms are finding big buyers, too. In September, Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face, a major hub for open models, for $12.93 billion, VentureBeat reported.

We wrote this summary from public statements by OpenRouter and its investors. It is not investment advice.