A New York AI startup just became one of the city’s newest unicorns. OpenRouter, which runs a platform that routes software requests across hundreds of competing AI models, announced a $113 million Series B on May 26, 2026, led by Alphabet’s growth fund CapitalG and valuing the company at roughly $1.3 billion.

The round

The financing was led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, with participation from a roster of strategic corporate venture arms — NVIDIA’s NVentures, ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Databricks Ventures among them — alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, according to the company’s announcement.

The post-money valuation of about $1.3 billion is more than double the roughly $547 million the company was valued at a year earlier, when it raised a $40 million Series A in June 2025. The jump, reported by TechCrunch, reflects how quickly capital is flowing to the infrastructure layer beneath the AI boom.

What OpenRouter does

Founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy, OpenRouter operates as a marketplace and routing layer for large language models, letting developers and enterprises tap hundreds of AI models — from frontier labs to open-source systems — through a single unified API. The pitch is that companies can switch among models for cost, speed or capability without rewiring their applications each time.

The growth metrics are steep. Over the past six months, weekly volume on the platform rose from 5 trillion to 25 trillion tokens, the unit of measurement for AI text processing. The company says it is on pace to process more than a quadrillion tokens this year and now serves more than 8 million developers building across over 400 models.

A New York AI story

OpenRouter’s raise adds to a busy stretch for New York’s AI sector. It landed in the same May 2026 window that AlleyWatch tracked among the city’s largest tech funding rounds — a month also headlined by serverless-compute startup Modal Labs’ $355 million Series C and a string of nine-figure health and fintech rounds.

The company plans to use the new capital to expand its routing, governance and optimization tools as more enterprises move AI models into production workflows — a sign that the infrastructure plumbing of the AI economy is increasingly being built and funded from New York, not only Silicon Valley.

Verification

Frequently Asked Questions

How much did OpenRouter raise and who led the round?
OpenRouter raised a $113 million Series B announced May 26, 2026, led by CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund. Participants included NVIDIA's NVentures, ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Databricks Ventures, alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures.
What is OpenRouter's valuation?
The round values OpenRouter at roughly $1.3 billion post-money, more than double its estimated $547 million valuation a year earlier following a $40 million Series A in June 2025.
What does OpenRouter do?
OpenRouter operates an AI model-exchange platform that lets developers and enterprises access, route and optimize workloads across hundreds of large language models through a single API. The company was founded in 2023 and is based in New York.
How fast is the company growing?
Over six months, weekly volume on the platform grew from 5 trillion to 25 trillion tokens. The company says it is on pace to process more than a quadrillion tokens this year and serves over 8 million developers building across 400-plus models.