OpenRouter, headquartered in San Francisco, is an emerging infrastructure company that provides a universal gateway to large language models from multiple providers. Founded in the early 2020s, the company was created to solve a growing challenge for developers and enterprises: accessing, comparing, and integrating different AI models through a single, standardized interface.
At its core, OpenRouter functions as an API marketplace for AI. Instead of being tied to a single model provider, developers can route requests through OpenRouter and access models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Cohere, and others. This approach allows users to experiment, benchmark, and deploy the right model for their specific use case without rewriting infrastructure.
The platform emphasizes interoperability, transparency, and choice. It provides tools for model switching, routing, and fallback logic, ensuring that applications remain resilient even as providers update or change access terms. Developers can also take advantage of cost and latency comparisons across models, making it easier to optimize performance and budgets.
OpenRouter has been quickly adopted by startups, researchers, and enterprises that want to avoid vendor lock-in while staying on the cutting edge of AI capabilities. By abstracting the complexity of integration, it allows organizations to focus on product development rather than infrastructure engineering.
By 2025, OpenRouter had emerged as a critical piece of the AI ecosystem, serving as the connective tissue between frontier labs and the developers who build on their models. With its marketplace approach, the company continues to champion openness, flexibility, and accessibility in the rapidly evolving world of generative AI.
