Nobody can deny the transformative effects large language models have had on product development, but the experience so far has been far from perfect. Incorporating LLMs into products today is like using electricity in the 1890s, before reliable power grids. Models flicker on and off, pricing changes overnight, and providers have different APIs.
Most solutions to these problems only add cognitive load. Making users choose a model means users need to know which models are the best for their given tasks and budgets. For product builders, understanding the nuances of each model and provider is critical to ensure they’re providing the best options for their customers. Because the generative AI space is moving so fast, keeping up with all of this is a full-time job.
Essentially, integrating third-party LLMs into products has meant too much time worrying about the model, and not enough time worrying about the overall product. We’ve largely solved these concerns with SaaS products overall: we trust certain products to do what they’re meant to, and to be as reliable as possible. But generative AI is a different beast.
All of these are reasons why we love OpenRouter. It’s becoming the grid operator AI desperately needs, by handling failover, load balancing, and routing so developers can focus on building. Additionally, OpenRouter gives users a single API to access hundreds of LLMs and provides features that anyone relying on LLM inference at scale will eventually need.
These include, among many other features, things like selecting models based on data privacy policies, automatic failover to alternate models; and various options for controlling outputs and calling external sources. It’s no wonder the OpenRouter API is used by more than 1 million developers, and that users are now spending 10x more on inference than they were just 7 months ago.
In other words, OpenRouter has quickly become the essential control plane for observability, monitoring and usage management of frontier AI models.
OpenRouter cofounder Alex Attallah and I became friends as undergrads over a decade ago, and even then it was clear Alex was a distributed systems savant. Where most see entropy, he sees the potential for order and elegance. And there are few places with more entropy today than frontier AI.
We couldn’t be more excited to have led OpenRouter’s round and continue working with Alex, Louis Vichy, and the entire team to build the best platform on the planet for managing LLM inference.
