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The universal gateway to every AI model — acquired by Stripe for ~$7.5B
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2023 | Employees: ~60 (2026, est.) | Stage: Acquired by Stripe (August 2026) | Website: https://openrouter.ai
OpenRouter was founded in 2023 by Steven Heidel, a machine-learning engineer and researcher (previously at Topology/Etsy and known in the ML community), who saw that the exploding number of AI models was creating a fragmentation problem: developers had to learn a new API for each provider, compare pricing manually, and manage reliability across vendors. OpenRouter's answer was a single API endpoint that routes requests across hundreds of models from every major provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek, and open-weights models alike — choosing the best price, latency, and quality for each call.\n\nThe company bootstrapped for its first two years, growing purely on developer word-of-mouth (including a hugely popular free tier that made OpenRouter the default place to try
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