OpenRouter

About OpenRouter

Financials

Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.

Products by OpenRouter

All products by OpenRouter reviewed by our AI panel of experts.

OpenRouterLLM Platforms

Unified API for accessing multiple AI models from different providers

Free8.1/10

How Our Review Panel Scores OpenRouter

Six independent reviewer personalities assessed OpenRouter's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.7 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.

Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.

Competitive Landscape

Who OpenRouter competes with, and how they differ.

L

LiteLLM

Open-source, self-hosted Python SDK and proxy server that developers run on their own infrastructure at no licensing cost, trading OpenRouter's managed one-click routing and unified billing for full data-residency control.

Together AI8.0/10

Operates its own GPU inference clusters and fine-tuning/training pipelines for open-source models rather than aggregating third-party API endpoints, competing on raw inference performance as much as model breadth.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

P

Portkey

An AI gateway built around governance — guardrails, budget controls, and prompt management layered on top of routing — targeting enterprise buyers who need compliance features OpenRouter doesn't emphasize.

Amazon Bedrock8.3/10

AWS's own managed multi-model API (Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and others) billed and access-controlled through existing AWS accounts, targeting enterprises already committed to AWS rather than provider-neutral developers.

2 products reviewed on TopReviewed

Fireworks AI8.0/10

Runs proprietary low-latency inference infrastructure for open and custom models, competing on speed and self-hosting/fine-tuning options rather than OpenRouter's breadth-first provider aggregation.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Hugging Face8.9/10

Combines a model hub of hundreds of thousands of open models with Inference Endpoints and Inference Providers, competing on open-model breadth and hosting/fine-tuning tools rather than OpenRouter's single-endpoint routing across commercial frontier models.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Company Timeline

Key milestones in OpenRouter's history, with sources.

1. Aug 16, 2026Acquisition

   Agreed to be acquired by Stripe for $7B+ (reported)

   Bloomberg reported Stripe had finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion; both companies officially confirmed the transaction on August 19, 2026, with OpenRouter continuing to operate under its own name, product, and roadmap pending close.

   techcrunch.com
2. May 28, 2026Funding

   Series B — $113M led by CapitalG

   OpenRouter raised a $113 million Series B led by CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund); weekly token volume had grown from 5 trillion to 25 trillion tokens over the prior six months, and press coverage put the post-money valuation near $1.3 billion.

   openrouter.ai
3. June 2025Funding

   Series A — $40M led by Menlo Ventures

   Menlo Ventures led a $40 million Series A, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, per Menlo's own investment announcement.

   menlovc.com
4. February 2025Funding

   Seed round — $12.5M led by Andreessen Horowitz

   OpenRouter raised a $12.5 million seed round in February 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz.

   helpnetsecurity.com
5. Aug 10, 2023Milestone

   Rebranded from Window to OpenRouter

   The company rebranded from Window to OpenRouter under the tagline "a unified interface for LLMs," having added Anthropic model support and automatic routing in the months prior.

   menlovc.com
6. Apr 5, 2023Founded

   Founded as Window, a Chrome extension for routing LLM chats

   Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy launched Window (windowai.to), a Chrome extension letting users route chat prompts across four models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Together's GPT-NeoXT, and Cohere xlarge) without sharing API keys with each app.

   menlovc.com