// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did OpenRouter say to the network? You're always routing for me.

OpenRouter
	Logo
Type	Private
Industry	Artificial intelligence
Founded	2023
Headquarters	New York City
Owner	Stripe, Inc.
Website	openrouter.ai

OpenRouter is an American artificial intelligence routing service provider that operates a platform for accessing and routing requests to large language models and other generative artificial intelligence models. The platform provides a unified application programming interface (API) through which developers can access models from multiple developers and inference providers.^[1] OpenRouter claims to have 400 trillion monthly tokens and 10 million monthly active users. ^[2]

History

OpenRouter was founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy and is based in New York City. In 2025, the company raised $12.5 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, followed by a $28 million Series A round led by Menlo Ventures.^[3] In May 2026, it raised $113 million in a Series B round led by CapitalG, valuing the company at approximately $1.3 billion.^[1] According to archived records, OpenRouter was originally powering an app named Window AI. ^[4]

In August 2026, reports from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal reported that Stripe, Inc. had finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion.^[5]^[6] Reports say Stripe did not buy the company because of singularity. ^[7]

Platform

Developers can select individual models or route requests between models based on factors including price and performance.^[3] The platform provides access to more than 400 models, including models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.^[8]

Compatible AI coding software

OpenRouter can be used as a model provider or inference backend for a number of AI-assisted software development tools, notable examples include:^[9]

Supported models

OpenRouter provides access to hundreds of artificial intelligence models, including large language models and models for image generation, video generation, speech synthesis, transcription, embeddings, reranking, and audio generation. Notable models and model families available through the service include:^[27]

Text

Image

Video

Speech

Transcription

Embeddings

Reranking

References

1 2 "OpenRouter more than doubles valuation to $1.3B in a year". TechCrunch. May 26, 2026. Retrieved July 16, 2026.
↑ "About - The Unified Interface For LLMs". OpenRouter. Retrieved September 18, 2026.
1 2 Chernova, Yuliya (June 25, 2025). "OpenRouter, a Marketplace for AI Models, Raises $40 Million". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved July 16, 2026.
↑ "OpenRouter". OpenRouter. Archived from the original on June 29, 2023. Retrieved September 18, 2026.
↑ Sun, Yazhou; Mascarenhas, Natasha; Smith, Paige (August 16, 2026). "Stripe Clinches Over $7 Billion Deal to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter". Bloomberg.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
↑ Jin, Berber; Thomas, Lauren; Clark, Kate (July 23, 2026). "Exclusive | Stripe in Talks to Buy Buzzy AI-Model Marketplace OpenRouter". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved August 27, 2026.
↑ Bort, Julie (August 19, 2026). "Stripe didn't really buy OpenRouter because of the 'singularity'". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 18, 2026.
↑ Council, Stephen (June 10, 2026). "The startups trying to save you from sky-high AI bills are getting showered with cash". Business Insider. Retrieved July 16, 2026.
↑ "How to Use OpenRouter With Any Coding Agent or AI Tool". OpenRouter. June 2026. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "Claude Code". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "Cline". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "Codex". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "Cursor". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "GDevelop". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "GitHub Copilot with OpenRouter". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "Goose". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "Hermes Agent". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "Junie". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "Kilo Code". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "OpenClaw". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "OpenCode". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "OpenHands". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "Oh My Pi". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
↑ "pi". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
↑ "Qwen Code". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "Zed Editor". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.
↑ "Models". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

External links

Official website

[tc-2026-1] 1 2 "OpenRouter more than doubles valuation to $1.3B in a year". TechCrunch. May 26, 2026. Retrieved July 16, 2026.

[2] "About - The Unified Interface For LLMs". OpenRouter. Retrieved September 18, 2026.

[wsj-3] 1 2 Chernova, Yuliya (June 25, 2025). "OpenRouter, a Marketplace for AI Models, Raises $40 Million". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved July 16, 2026.

[4] "OpenRouter". OpenRouter. Archived from the original on June 29, 2023. Retrieved September 18, 2026.

[5] Sun, Yazhou; Mascarenhas, Natasha; Smith, Paige (August 16, 2026). "Stripe Clinches Over $7 Billion Deal to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter". Bloomberg.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

[6] Jin, Berber; Thomas, Lauren; Clark, Kate (July 23, 2026). "Exclusive | Stripe in Talks to Buy Buzzy AI-Model Marketplace OpenRouter". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved August 27, 2026.

[7] Bort, Julie (August 19, 2026). "Stripe didn't really buy OpenRouter because of the 'singularity'". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 18, 2026.

[8] Council, Stephen (June 10, 2026). "The startups trying to save you from sky-high AI bills are getting showered with cash". Business Insider. Retrieved July 16, 2026.

[9] "How to Use OpenRouter With Any Coding Agent or AI Tool". OpenRouter. June 2026. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[10] "Claude Code". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[11] "Cline". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[12] "Codex". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[13] "Cursor". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[14] "GDevelop". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[15] "GitHub Copilot with OpenRouter". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[16] "Goose". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[17] "Hermes Agent". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[18] "Junie". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[19] "Kilo Code". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[20] "OpenClaw". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[21] "OpenCode". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[22] "OpenHands". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[23] "Oh My Pi". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 31, 2026.

[24] "pi". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 31, 2026.

[25] "Qwen Code". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[26] "Zed Editor". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

[27] "Models". OpenRouter. Retrieved August 30, 2026.

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v t e Large language models (LLMs)
List of LLMs AI Companies Benchmarks List of chatbots Foundation model Generative AI
Concepts	Language model NLP NLG Computational linguistics Foundation model Small language model Reasoning model Generative pre-trained transformer Transformer Attention KV cache Context window Tokenization Word embedding Parameter Hyperparameter Autoregression Mixture of experts (MoE) Inference Model compression Knowledge distillation Speculative decoding PagedAttention Neural scaling law Multimodality Open weights
Training, prompting, and alignment	Self-supervised learning Supervised learning Fine-tuning Instruction tuning RLHF Constitutional AI AI alignment AI safety Mechanistic interpretability Prompt engineering In-context learning Chain-of-thought prompting RAG Prompt injection Adversarial machine learning Hallucination Stochastic parrot Glitch token Generative engine optimization
Models	Apertus BERT BLOOM Chinchilla Claude DBRX DeepSeek-LLM Gemini Gemma GloVe GLM GPT GPT-J PanGu Granite Hy Inkling Jais LaMDA Laguna S Llama MiMo Minerva Mistral and Mixtral Muse Spark Muse Glimmer Nemotron PaLM Phi Qwen Seq2seq T5 Vicuna Word2vec XLNet
Chatbots and assistants	Amazon Q ChatGPT Character.ai Claude Claude Code DeepSeek Doubao Ernie Bot Gemini Grok Kimi Kimi Code Lumo Microsoft Copilot Meta AI Perplexity AI Sparrow You.com
Agents, coding, and applications	AI agent Intelligent agent AutoGPT CrewAI LangChain Manus Model Context Protocol Agent2Agent OpenAI Codex Vibe coding Code generation Question answering Machine translation Text summarization Chatbot Virtual assistant
Software	PyTorch TensorFlow Hugging Face llama.cpp LM Studio Ollama SGLang TensorRT-LLM vLLM ONNX OpenVINO Vector database ChromaDB Deep learning software Open-source AI software
Hardware and infrastructure	AI data center CUDA GPU High Bandwidth Memory Neural processing unit TPU
Benchmarks, evaluation, and detection	Language model benchmark MMLU Humanity's Last Exam LMArena LLM-as-a-Judge Perplexity metric GPTZero Artificial intelligence content detection Undetectable.ai
Datasets and data	Data set Text corpus Common Crawl The Pile Web scraping Synthetic data Training, validation, and test data sets
Organizations	AI21 Labs Alibaba Anthropic Baidu Cohere DeepSeek EleutherAI Google DeepMind Hugging Face Meta AI Microsoft AI Mistral AI MiniMax Moonshot AI Nvidia OpenAI OpenRouter Sarvam AI StepFun Technology Innovation Institute Thinking Machines Lab xAI
People	Sam Altman Dario Amodei Yoshua Bengio Aidan Gomez Demis Hassabis Geoffrey Hinton Andrej Karpathy Yann LeCun Percy Liang Liang Wenfeng Christopher D. Manning Arthur Mensch Mira Murati Alec Radford Noam Shazeer Ilya Sutskever Ashish Vaswani Andrew Ng
Social, economic, and governance	AI boom AI bubble AI slop AI anthropomorphism AI arms race Chatbot psychosis Competition Copyright Deaths linked to chatbots Dependency (GAID) Environmental impact Regulation Ethics Existential risk In education In healthcare Workplace impact
Category:Large language models