Companies increasingly rely on more than one artificial intelligence model to power their software, for efficiency — and increasingly, for cost. That is driving demand, and investor interest, in a start-up that helps them do just that.
The start-up, OpenRouter, which was founded three years ago, describes itself as a marketplace for A.I. models. It plans to announce on Tuesday that it has raised $113 million, led by CapitalG, an investment arm of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
The round values OpenRouter at about $1.3 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the round who wasn’t authorized to disclose the figure publicly. That is more than double the company’s value in its previous fund-raising round last year.
Alex Atallah, an OpenRouter founder and its chief executive, described his company as the A.I. equivalent of Stripe, the financial giant that handles all payments for customers through a single access point. It also helps companies avoid being locked into one particular model provider.
“A lot of what we do is try to help people find the right vendor for the job,” he said.
The rising popularity of OpenRouter — which says it now processes 25 trillion tokens, the basic unit of A.I. computing, every week, up from five trillion six months ago — underscores the growing number of models available and the rapid rise of the token economy. (Mr. Atallah declined to provide financial performance statistics, including revenue.)
While the general public knows of some, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, OpenRouter says it provides access to more than 400, with some prioritizing heavy-duty reasoning and others speed.
Perhaps just as important, companies are increasingly mindful of the costs of A.I. use, especially as they rely more on agents that consume more tokens and push employees to use A.I. more. The chief technology officer of Uber, Praveen Neppalli Naga, recently told The Information that the ride-hailing giant spent its entire A.I. budget for 2026 just a few months into the year.
That increasingly means many companies are using open-source models, which are free to use, to help cut down on costs. Mr. Atallah said that OpenRouter was helping customers significantly shrink their expenses. He added that if companies aren’t careful, running queries through A.I. models, known as inference, could end up leading to “an infinite cost center.”
Indeed, the most popular models used by OpenRouter’s customers over the past week were open-source ones from the Chinese companies DeepSeek and Tencent, followed by Anthropic’s high-end Claude 4.7 Opus.
It was that approach to the A.I. boom, essentially being a gateway to models, that drew CapitalG to OpenRouter, according to Jane Alexander and Mo Jomaa, partners at the investment firm. While other companies, like Vercel, also let customers choose different A.I. models for different tasks, Mr. Jomaa said that OpenRouter’s rising popularity gave it an edge in learning what customers want and steering them to the best options.
OpenRouter had not been looking to raise money when CapitalG expressed interest in investing several months ago, Mr. Atallah said. But the firm sent what he called an impressive “reverse pitch deck,” and they quickly lined up a new fund-raising round.
Other participants in the round include the venture capital arms of Nvidia, ServiceNow, MongoDB, Snowflake and Databricks, as well as the existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures.
Mr. Atallah said that OpenRouter planned to use the capital to continue growing, including by hiring more engineers and offering more products.
