OpenRouter, an AI gateway startup founded in 2023, has secured $113 million in Series B funding led by CapitalG, Alphabet's growth venture fund. The company now commands a valuation of approximately $1.3 billion post-money, more than doubling its valuation from the estimated $547 million it achieved just a year ago when it raised $40 million in Series A funding, according to PitchBook data cited by The New York Times. The earlier round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sequoia.
The San Francisco-based company operates a gateway service that enables enterprises and developers to access and compare more than 400 AI models from providers including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI, and DeepSeek. Users can select different models for different tasks to optimize costs or improve reasoning and accuracy. OpenRouter reports it processes 100 trillion tokens per month—roughly 25 trillion per week—a fivefold increase from the 5 trillion tokens it was handling weekly just six months ago. The platform claims 8 million global users.
This rapid growth reflects a broader industry shift from AI training to inference and now to agents. OpenRouter's success suggests enterprises are reluctant to commit to a single AI model provider, avoiding the vendor lock-in that plagued relationships with SaaS vendors. Instead, companies prefer keeping multiple models available and swapping between them based on task requirements, cost considerations, or performance needs.