Hi HN! OpenRouter co-founder and COO here. Lots of questions about why we raised!
First off: We remain founder-led and founder-controlled, and intend on being here for a long time, creating awesome products for builders all over the world. We are basically a bunch of tinkerers who like building things, and try to make stuff that we would like, when building with AI.
Since this is about the raise though, happy to share perspective on it.
We believe that strong companies should have a strong balance sheets. We touch large volumes of spend, and have large spend commits across the ecosystem; having the cash to withstand what may come is a responsible buy-down of risk, and makes the company extremely durable.
It also tells our larger customers and provider partners that we will be able to continue to serve them (and pay our bills) for a long time to come. We don't need venture dollars to continue scaling (indeed the business is healthy) but you know when you don't want to raise $100m? When you really need it!
This is also good validation to employees (current and future) that the value we are creating together is real. We also take seriously our obligation to make a return for anyone who invests; we aren't valuationmaxxing and have the privilege of getting to pick who we work with. I don't think that gets a lot of airtime in the overall start-up world, but I think it's important!
Happy to answer questions and THANK YOU to everyone here who uses OpenRouter, and to everyone who has feedback for how we can improve!
Heya! First off, I love your product. consolidated billing/auth solves a big pain-point, so thank you.
Less about the funding and more about the long game: where do you see OpenRouter in 3-5 years, and which product bets are you most excited about right now? Do you guys think with this new raise you'll branch out into other adjacent verticals?
What will OpenRouter use the $100m for? You say that it "makes the company extremely durable" and is "good validation to employees", but I'd imagine that there are more interesting things to do with 100 million dollars.
Thank you for Openrouter, used it briefly. Tested the product a year ago or so, and wasn't able to get structured output from google's gemini model via openrouter.
Would it be possible to get "raw" access to the provider APIs, but still keep the consolidated billing? The unified API is great when it works, but it often causes hassle with more exotic use cases and new API features.
i second this, And I think this will only get worse as the bigger companies seek to decommoditize their models and make moats
Are you thinking of hiring any PMs? love your product!