OpenRouter, an AI company under the co-founders of OpenSea, raised $40 million in financing, led by a16z, with a valuation of $500 million.

Gate News bot message: OpenRouter, led by a former co-founder of OpenSea, has completed a $40 million seed and Series A funding round, aimed at accelerating the development of its large language model aggregation platform.

This round of financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital and well-known industry angel investors. According to a source cited by The Wall Street Journal, the company's current valuation is $500 million.

OpenRouter is an artificial intelligence infrastructure startup that provides a market and routing platform for language models (LLM). It aggregates hundreds of models from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, and automatically guides users to the most suitable model based on cost, speed, accuracy, and privacy needs.

"The artificial intelligence stack is becoming fragmented. OpenRouter is unifying them through a unified API, unified contracts, and industry-leading uptime—this is precisely the infrastructure solution that defines a new category," said Anjney Midha, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Developers use points to run inferences, while OpenRouter charges a small fee per request, aimed at simplifying model selection and optimization in the increasingly crowded AI field.

Atallah co-founded OpenSea in 2018 with CEO Devin Finzer and served as the Chief Technology Officer during the company's rapid growth phase. In July 2022, he resigned from his position at the NFT marketplace to continue "building from scratch," but still retained his board membership.

Source: The Block