From 4 models to more than 500, OpenRouter was acquired after growing 30,000 times in three years
Author: Menlo Ventures Compiled by: Jia Huan, ChainCatcher Original title: Early Investors Behind OpenRouter Revisited Investments Today, OpenRouter announced that it has reached an acquisition agreement with Stripe. OpenRouter was launched in 2023, just over three years ago. OpenRouter was initially launched as a “unified interface for LLM” and only supported 4 models at the time: GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT NeoXt and Cohere xlarge by Together. When the company was founded, it was based on two core judgments: first, AI will eventually be used on a large scale and penetrate various fields; second, there will be many different models on the market, each with trade-offs, and users will choose different models according to different needs. As it turned out, both judgments far exceeded expectations at the time. Since its launch, the number of tokens processed by the OpenRouter platform has increased by about 30,000 times. Currently, it has exceeded 4,500 trillion tokens on an annualized basis, and the scale of expenditure on the platform has reached a very impressive level. Meanwhile, the number of models supported by OpenRouter has grown from the original 4 to over 500. Figure: OpenRouter Token usage growth from inception to acquisition Menlo Ventures is fortunate to be part of this journey. In March 2025, we participated in OpenRouter's seed funding round through the Anthology Fund set up in partnership with Anthropic. OpenRouter founder and CEO Alex Atallah previously founded OpenSea, which was once valued at $13.3 billion. His co-founders include tech guru Louis Vichy, whom he met on Discord, and highly executive COO Chris Clark. In May 2025, we led OpenRouter's Series A funding round, with Matt joining the company's board of directors, and Deedy as a board observer. Earlier this year, after seeing OpenRouter's rapid growth in customer numbers and revenue, and the company built a product route with stronger “model intelligence” capabilities around model selection and evaluation, we continued to step up Series B financing. In the tech industry, it often takes years for an idea to change from the judgment of a few people to industry consensus. And just a few weeks ago, this happened: from Ramp to Cursor, more than 10 companies launched their own model routing products almost simultaneously. In just a few years, OpenRouter has become one of the most important companies in the AI era. Picture: Group photo when deciding to lead OpenRouter Round A At first glance, Stripe doesn't seem like the most natural buyer of OpenRouter, but the two companies are actually strikingly similar. Both use an API that can be directly accessed to simplify the otherwise complicated transaction process and charge a certain percentage of the fee. It's just that OpenRouter deals with AI models. As Stripe has always said, the two companies combined and are still doing the same thing: increasing “internet GDP.” In fact, over a year ago, OpenRouter called itself the “Stripe of LLM.” OpenRouter's core value OpenRouter was one of the first companies Deedy came into contact with after joining Menlo in 2024. This company is almost right at the heart of our AI infrastructure investment logic. Menlo presented two judgments necessary to invest in OpenRouter in the 2024 Enterprise AI Report: AI spending will increase dramatically, and developers will not only use one model, but multiple models at the same time. Figure: Menlo's initial contact email to OpenRouter As someone who can also write code and actually use these models, we realized long ago that there is a very clear difference in cost, latency, and performance between the different models...
