OpenRouter

OpenRouter is a unified API and marketplace that gives developers and enterprises access to more than 400 large language models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, and DeepSeek through a single OpenAI compatible endpoint. Instead of integrating a separate SDK for each provider, an application points at one API and reaches any model with the same request format, while OpenRouter normalizes responses so the output shape stays consistent regardless of which lab served the request. Founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah, the company is independent, headquartered in New York, and raised a $113 million Series B in May 2026 led by CapitalG at a valuation near $1.3 billion.

The platform is a smart routing layer that selects an endpoint based on price, latency, uptime, and throughput, with automatic failover when a provider is rate limited or unavailable and roughly 25 milliseconds of added overhead. Developers can steer routing with variants such as one for the fastest response and one for the cheapest option, and can bring their own provider keys. OpenRouter processes more than 25 trillion tokens a week across more than 8 million developers, and publishes usage and model rankings as open data that have become a widely referenced signal for real world model adoption.

Beyond text, the platform now supports image, audio, speech, transcription, embedding, and video models, along with governance and cost controls aimed at enterprises moving from single model pilots into multi model production. Pricing is consumption based: there is no subscription to start, free models are available, and paid usage is billed as pass through inference spend with a fee of about five percent on credits. This positions OpenRouter as the routing and gateway layer between agents and model providers, handling reliability, cost optimization, and provider breadth so teams never have to commit to a single model.