Excited to announce a $40M raise for @OpenRouterAI (seed + A), led by a16z & Menlo! LLM inference will be the biggest software market in the world. We've become the #1 control plane. Here's what's next:

LLMs deserve their own place on the web, so that’s what @louis_g_v and I set out to build in April 2023. Since then, we’ve seen a Cambrian explosion in LLMs, with 450+ live today. Think of us like Stripe for LLMs. Companies typically use 3-6 models, changing them in one line of code, getting all features in one place without lock-in.

Traction so far: • >$100M GMV, up 10x in 7 months • 1M+ developers using our API • 60+ GPU hosts, trillions of tokens processed weekly, ~25 ms edge overhead

Why is this happening? • Inference spend is climbing faster than head-count • Models have downtime (“intelligence brownouts,” as @karpathy called them) and data policies diverge • CTOs need reliability, CFOs need cost visibility, CISOs need routing controls AI companies are becoming de-facto model routers themselves...

Full story in the WSJ: Thanks to @a16z, @menloventures, @sequoia, and the others who supported us in our angel round, including @amasad, @OfficialLoganK, @FEhrsam, @dfinzer, @jweinstein, and @figma!