OpenRouter Raises $120M at a $1.3B Valuation
inc.comSuper convenient for switching out models, and they also play a vetting function. Cool to see a useful service raising!
A little crazy that Google seems to be the lead investor though...
I was looking at OpenRouter earlier today, after becoming frustrated with VertexAI. Similar in that they offer a menu of many models, different in that Google is running them and OpenRouter is a proxy.
If OpenRouter is not much more than a middle man, what business model are they raising money on? Surveillance?
They reduce friction to using different models and providers.
Don't want to spend 4 hours getting an API key to use Google AI? Use openrouter
Don't trust Chinese providers with your data? Use Openrouter and blacklist non-US inference providers.
They are a marketplace for model providers, which is quite a nice business model.
Being the middleman is always nice until the need is obviated. My understanding is that this is largely used to cycle through free usage tiers without getting rate-limited. Anonymous Credentials is designed to end that.
What makes this preferable to a self hosted or framework built-in version?
Convenience. They sell very convenient shovels in a goldrush.