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. OpenRouter claims to have 400 trillion monthly tokens and 10 million monthly active users.
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. In May 2026, it raised $113 million in a Series B round led by CapitalG, valuing the company at approximately $1.3 billion. According to archived records, OpenRouter was originally powering an app named Window AI.
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. Reports say Stripe did not buy the company because of singularity.
Platform
Developers can select individual models or route requests between models based on factors including price and performance. The platform provides access to more than 400 models, including models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
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:
Claude Code Cline Codex CLI Cursor GDevelop GitHub Copilot Goose Hermes Agent Junie Kilo Code OpenClaw OpenCode OpenHands Oh My Pi Pi Qwen Code Zed
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:
Text
Claude DBRX DeepSeek ERNIE Gemini Gemma GLM GPT-4 GPT-4o GPT-5 Grok Hy Kimi Llama Mistral MiMo Muse Glimmer Nemotron OpenAI o1 OpenAI o3 OLMo Phi Qwen Sarvam Step-3.7-Flash Yi
Image Flux Gemini GPT Image Grok Imagine Qwen Image Recraft
Video Grok Imagine Kling AI Seedance Sora Veo
Speech Gemini GPT-4o Grok Qwen Voxtral
Transcription GPT-4o Grok Nemotron Qwen Voxtral Whisper
Embeddings Gemini Mistral Nemotron Qwen
Reranking Nemotron Qwen
See also List of AI companies List of AI-assisted software development tools List of chatbots List of large language models LiteLLMopen-source LLM gateway LM Studiodesktop application for locally running and interacting with LLMs
References
External links