[numlocked]

Hi HN! OpenRouter co-founder and COO here. Lots of questions about why we raised!

First off: We remain founder-led and founder-controlled, and intend on being here for a long time, creating awesome products for builders all over the world. We are basically a bunch of tinkerers who like building things, and try to make stuff that we would like, when building with AI.

Since this is about the raise though, happy to share perspective on it.

We believe that strong companies should have a strong balance sheets. We touch large volumes of spend, and have large spend commits across the ecosystem; having the cash to withstand what may come is a responsible buy-down of risk, and makes the company extremely durable.

It also tells our larger customers and provider partners that we will be able to continue to serve them (and pay our bills) for a long time to come. We don't need venture dollars to continue scaling (indeed the business is healthy) but you know when you don't want to raise $100m? When you really need it!

This is also good validation to employees (current and future) that the value we are creating together is real. We also take seriously our obligation to make a return for anyone who invests; we aren't valuationmaxxing and have the privilege of getting to pick who we work with. I don't think that gets a lot of airtime in the overall start-up world, but I think it's important!

Happy to answer questions and THANK YOU to everyone here who uses OpenRouter, and to everyone who has feedback for how we can improve!

[humam_alhusaini]

What will OpenRouter use the $100m for? You say that it "makes the company extremely durable" and is "good validation to employees", but I'd imagine that there are more interesting things to do with 100 million dollars.

[Nav_Panel]

Think about what OpenRouter primarily traffics in and what you can do with that raw material.

[laweijfmvo]

seriously. you don’t raise $100m just to be safe unless you’re bleeding cash or you lied to the investors.

[tehlike]

there are companies who raised xxxM$ and never had to touch the money because they were already profitable.

[numlocked]

Yep!

Everyone wants a conspiracy, but what I originally posted is in fact the boring truth. Having a bunch of cash in the bank makes for a durable business!

[potamic]

> We don't need venture dollars to continue scaling (indeed the business is healthy) but you know when you don't want to raise $100m? When you really need it!

That's a nice narrative but I suspect you're not touching upon the investor pressure side of things. Your earlier investors would be upon you to show a multiple in valuation beyond what the balance sheets can show. The only way to do that is to raise more money.

The problem with this is that you're now beholden to another set of investors who will also expect a multiple on their investment which makes increasing valuation your primary objective, even to the detriment of the business. With a margin business you could sustain for a long time even when the market stagnates, but you've lost that option when you first took money from someone. It's an all or nothing play now.

[numlocked]

Great investors are helpful, not harmful :) You want accountability from smart, experienced partners!

[potamic]

Sure, but only to the means where they see a multiple. And sometimes that be at odds with the fundamental value prop of a business.

[numlocked]

By default (and in most cases) investors and operators are aligned. When we diligence our investors, we call companies they worked with where things didn’t go well, and speak to those founders. Understanding how investors operate when it’s not all up-and-to-the-right is important when picking partners!

[cheschire]

I’m interested what you believe the intent of your message to be. You’re talking to a COO that just raised money as if you’re mentoring someone about to approach VCs for the first time. Hugely patronizing attitudes often just get a pass here on HN, but what is your purpose for using one here?

[potamic]

I think you misread my comment, I might've been lazy in constructing it. I don't mean to mentor anyone, rather I'm putting out my read of the situation so there's a common ground over which to discuss.

For me, raising $100m when it's not needed doesn't add up. Nobody lends money with the idea to "keep it, just in case". There are always commitments and expectations and obligations to meet those expectations. So when they said they didn't really need to raise, while also not talking about investor expectations, feels there's more to the situation than is being let on.

[jampekka]

Would it be possible to get "raw" access to the provider APIs, but still keep the consolidated billing? The unified API is great when it works, but it often causes hassle with more exotic use cases and new API features.

[matja]

+1 this. Example: Using Mistral TTS voice cloning appears to be not possible via the "providers" pass-through object in the OpenRouter API because some parameters are always forwarded which conflict with the provider's parameters.

[numlocked]

Interesting. Will look into it! We are releasing pass through API params soon which might hit the bid, but is a bit different than what you are describing.

[jampekka]

API param passthrough will probably help with many of the cases. Things like sampling params and constrained decoding and returning logits tend to be very finicky with the translated params. But the return value translation also makes debugging these harder.

While I'm at it, another annoyance is that OpenRouter doesn't seem to have a very good API playground. The chat does work, but the params exposed there are quite limited and it's not clear how the GUI fields map to API params. I now have resorted to exporting the chat and figure out the params from the export JSON. Just having an option to get a curl command for the chat call would help a lot, and shouldn't be hard to implement.

Edit: I think the ideal implementation for the direct API access would be that I could generate API keys for the provider at OpenRouter that I would give in the provider API calls, but that would get billed through OpenRouter. Second best would probably be a raw HTTP proxy/tunnel that injects OpenRouter's own keys (or however it is that you call the providers). I don't really know though how you call the providers and what kind of new provider integrations these would require.

[Oli_dev]

i second this, And I think this will only get worse as the bigger companies seek to decommoditize their models and make moats

[Oli_dev]

Heya! First off, I love your product. consolidated billing/auth solves a big pain-point, so thank you.

Less about the funding and more about the long game: where do you see OpenRouter in 3-5 years, and which product bets are you most excited about right now? Do you guys think with this new raise you'll branch out into other adjacent verticals?

[numlocked]

Our general theory of the case is that, in the not so distant future, inference will be the second largest opex line item for most companies (behind headcount) and that sourcing, measuring, and governing those tokens is a massive horizontal opportunity.

We will inevitably expand into adjacencies because we like building things and experimenting and we have a lot of people with great taste who are likely to ship cool things that customers want to use!

Edit: also - THANK YOU!

[CMay]

The Openrouter website says that y'all do not train on the data, but it does not make it clear that the data is not shared with any 3rd parties (other than the LLM provider) who might train on it.

There is the example of Apple and Google providing transport for push notifications, but claiming to delete the content and only preserve the metadata.

What is Openrouter's policy on this? Is the logging of user data an essential part of the business model, or is the primary business model really facilitating a proxy between multiple services and nothing beyond that? If everything is logged, do y'all store it securely so that if one database is stolen (by China for example) then it's not useful on its own?

With the race for AGI and everyone training on each other's outputs, Openrouter is clearly in a position to abuse all of that even though the major providers weaken their output to limit the value of distilling them.

[numlocked]

We have never sold any prompt data to anyone, in any form, and have no plans to do so. Full stop.

[segmondy]

Can you also confirm that you do not log/retain it. 100% pass through. If you are logging it, you could one day change your position on that.

[numlocked]

We have two mechanisms whereby we retain data. Both are opt-in and off by default.

One mechanism where you get a discount and we can use the data (in theory this does mean sell it; but our intent is to use it to make efficient dynamic routing solutions. But absolutely we could one day sell it) and another where we retain it for you so you can see it in your logs. We have no rights to this data in any way. This is similar to how any tracing/logging solution works.

Both and opt-in. If you don’t opt in, we don’t retain anything and are a pass through with regards to your prompt data.

All of this is carefully documented and I encourage you to explore and chat with the docs.

[CMay]

Do you specify prompt data, because prompt data is subject to user copyright, but LLM outputs are not? There is the issue that LLM outputs might leak user data back through the response. Y'all don't log those either, correct?

[Something1234]

The biggest missing feature for me is the differentiation on zero data retention providers and if a model works for the rules I defined. Right now there’s no way to hide the providers who don’t work for the zdr rules

[numlocked]

What differentiation are looking for? We have good documentation of every provider and what their data retention stance is, and you can figure allow/blocklists for all providers.

Check out the Guardrails section under settings and tell me what’s missing!

[Something1234]

I’m specifically looking for it on the model page before I click into it if there’s any valid provider for it

[lazerlex]

There’s a filter on the models page for ZDR supported models

[VitaliyKorbut]

Thank you for Openrouter, used it briefly. Tested the product a year ago or so, and wasn't able to get structured output from google's gemini model via openrouter.

[treme]

how come cancelling api keys with left over prepaid credit isn't refunded?

[numlocked]

Refund policies are clearly documented in our terms. We actually DO offer refunds within 24hrs of credit purchase, which is significantly more flexible than most companies that operate in a similar way. And we try to use good judgement when there are extenuating circumstances.

[treme]

I understand that the refund policy is documented. But “clearly documented” and “fair to the customer” are separate questions.

If a user cancels API access while still holding prepaid credits, that unused balance represents compute they never consumed. Unlike a shipped physical product or a fixed one-time service cost, unused API credit does not seem to impose much marginal cost on OpenRouter to reallocate or refund.

So the issue isn’t whether the policy is disclosed. It’s whether keeping unused prepaid credit after cancellation is the right default, especially when the user is no longer able or willing to use the service.

[pclark]

Are you thinking of hiring any PMs? love your product!

[numlocked]

Just sent you a DM on twitter!