Popular AI gateway maker OpenRouter, founded in 2023, has raised a whopping $113 million in Series B funding led by CapitalG, the growth venture fund of Google’s parent company Alphabet. The company did not disclose its new valuation, but the New York Times reported it was about $1.3 billion post-money.
This is a significant increase from the estimated $547 million post-money valuation it reached a year ago, according to PitchBook, after raising $40 million in Series A funding in June 2025. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sequoia.
What a difference a year makes! Since then, AI jobs have moved from training to inference and now to agents. Correspondingly, the popularity of OpenRouter’s AI gateway has skyrocketed. This gateway helps enterprises and other AI users choose different models for different jobs to control costs or increase inference and accuracy for the task at hand.
OpenRouter says it provides access to over 400 models including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI, and DeepSeek. It has 8 million users worldwide and claims to process 100 trillion tokens every month, or about 25 trillion a week. This is a 5x increase compared to the 5 trillion tokens it was processing per week just six months ago.
The success of OpenRouter means that AI models are becoming invisible and interchangeable engines for AI tasks.
Rather than a future where startups and companies standardize based on their chosen models, perhaps creating a single all-powerful model maker in the process, OpenRouter’s growth points to something else. Enterprises are not going to be locked into a model vendor like they are with various SaaS providers. The multi-model future is already here.
