OpenRouter more than doubles valuation to $1.3B in a year
Popular AI gateway maker OpenRouterfounded in 2023, has raised a hefty Series B of $113 million led by CapitalG, the growth venture fund of Google parent company Alphabet. Although the startup did not announce its new valuation, The New York Times writes reports that post-money it came to about $1.3 billion.
This is a significant increase from the estimated post-money valuation of $547 million a year ago, according to PitchBook, after raising $40 million in Series A funding in June 2025. That round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sequoia.
What a difference a year makes. Since then, AI work has shifted from training to inference to, now, agents. And in response, OpenRouter’s AI gateway has skyrocketed in popularity. The gateway helps companies and other AI users select different models for different tasks to control costs or increase reasoning and accuracy for the task at hand.
OpenRouter offers access to more than 400 models, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI and DeepSeek, it says. It claims 8 million global users and 100 trillion tokens processed per month, or about 25 trillion per week. That’s a fivefold increase from the five trillion tokens it processed per week six months ago.
The success of OpenRouter means that the AI model is increasingly becoming an invisible, interchangeable engine for AI tasks.
Rather than a future in which startups or enterprises standardize based on a model of choice – perhaps creating one all-powerful model maker – OpenRouter’s growth points to something else. Companies don’t plan to lock into a single vendor model, as they did with their various SaaS providers. The multi-model future is already here.
