One API. 300+ Models. 60+ Providers. And Why Every AI‑Native Startup Needs This.

We’ve featured a lot of amazing AI tools in our App of the Week series. But OpenRouter might be the most foundational one yet. Because if you’re building anything with AI — and let’s be honest, by 2026 that’s basically everyone — you’re going to hit the same wall I did: which model do you use?

GPT‑5.2 just dropped. Claude Opus 4.5 is crushing benchmarks. Gemini 3 Pro is cheaper. Llama is getting better every month. DeepSeek came out of nowhere. And that hot new model you read about on X this morning? It’ll be outdated by Wednesday.

OpenRouter solves this in the most elegant way possible: one API to access them all.

Everyone building in AI + B2B at any scale needs this.

What OpenRouter Actually Does

At its core, OpenRouter is a unified API gateway that gives you access to 300+ AI models from 60+ providers through a single endpoint. Instead of managing separate integrations with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and dozens of others — with different SDKs, different auth systems, different billing — you get one API key, one contract, and one bill.

But here’s where it gets interesting. OpenRouter isn’t just an aggregator. It’s a router. The platform automatically:

• Routes prompts to the best available provider based on cost, speed, accuracy, and your privacy requirements

• Handles failovers automatically — if one provider goes down, your requests route to another

• Optimizes for cost without sacrificing quality

• Adds just ~15 ms of latency (they run at the edge)

This is the infrastructure layer that every AI‑native company needs but almost nobody wants to build themselves.

The Numbers That Matter

OpenRouter has scaled fast:

• 25 trillion tokens processed monthly

• 5 M+ global users

• $100 M+ in annualized inference spend flowing through the platform (up from $10 M in late 2024)

• $5 M ARR as of mid‑2025, growing 400 % year‑over‑year

• Valued at $500 M after their $40 M raise led by a16z and Menlo Ventures

That last number is worth pausing on. Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Menlo Ventures don’t all pile into a Series A for a nice‑to‑have tool. They pile in because they see category‑defining infrastructure.

Why This Matters for B2B

Here’s the thing I keep telling founders: inference is becoming your biggest cost center, and it’s probably coming from four or more different models. The sophisticated companies have already figured this out and built some kind of in‑house gateway. But then they realize making LLMs “just work” is a massive engineering lift.

As Alex Atallah, OpenRouter’s CEO, put it: “They’re ripping out home‑grown solutions and bringing in OpenRouter so they can focus on their domain‑specific problems, not LLM integration.”

This is the classic build‑vs‑buy decision, and for most companies, building your own LLM routing infrastructure is like building your own payment processing. You can do it. But why would you?

The Founder: Alex Atallah

If the name sounds familiar, it should. Alex co‑founded OpenSea in 2018 and served as CTO during its meteoric rise — the platform hit $4 B+ in monthly volume at its peak. He stepped down in 2022 to “build something from zero to one” and started OpenRouter in 2023.

The pattern here is interesting: Alex has now built the first and largest marketplace in two completely different emerging‑technology categories. OpenSea for NFTs. OpenRouter for LLMs. Both are fundamentally about providing unified access to fragmented ecosystems.

He’s a Stanford CS grad, Y Combinator and HF0 alum, with time at Palantir. He knows how to build infrastructure that scales.

Key Features for Enterprise

Beyond the basic routing, OpenRouter offers some enterprise‑critical capabilities:

• Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) — Use your existing provider relationships while still getting OpenRouter’s routing and analytics

• Custom data policies — Fine‑grained control over which providers and models can see your prompts

• Zero Data Retention (ZDR) options — For companies with strict compliance requirements

• Real‑time accounting and billing — See exactly what you’re spending across models

• OpenAI SDK compatibility — Drop‑in replacement, no code changes needed

The pricing model is simple: pay‑as‑you‑go credits with about a 5 % fee on top of inference spend. For startups, that’s basically free. For enterprises doing serious volume, they offer custom plans.

Meet Them IRL at SaaStr AI 2026

OpenRouter will be a Super Gold sponsor at SaaStr AI 2026, May 12‑14 in the SF Bay Area.

If you’re building AI‑native products, wrestling with multi‑model architectures, or just want to understand where LLM infrastructure is headed — find the OpenRouter team. They’re living at the intersection of every major AI model release and seeing real‑world usage patterns that nobody else has access to.

(Their State of AI report with a16z analyzed 100 trillion tokens of usage data. That’s not a typo.)

The Backbone for Multi‑Mode AI Applications

OpenRouter is one of those rare infrastructure plays that becomes more valuable as the ecosystem gets more complex. Every new model release, every new provider, every new pricing change — it all increases the value of having a unified layer.

This is picks‑and‑shovels for the AI gold rush. And with the backing they have, the traction they’ve shown, and the team behind it, OpenRouter is positioned to be the default backbone for multi‑model AI applications.

Try it: https://openrouter.ai/

Meet them: SaaStr AI 2026 | May 12‑14 | SF Bay Area