OpenSea co-founder raises $40M for AI startup OpenRouter

• OpenRouter Raises $40 Million in Funding Round
• Alex Atallah bets on AI after leaving OpenSea
• Platform connects developers to language models like OpenAI

OpenRouter, an AI infrastructure company founded by Alex Atallah, former CTO of OpenSea, has raised $40 million in seed and Series A funding. The investment was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with support from Sequoia and influential industry angel investors. Second The Wall Street Journal reported that the company had reached a market valuation of $500 million.

OPENSEA CO-FOUNDER ALEX ATALLAH RAISES $40M FOR AI STARTUP OPENROUTER

Alex Atallah, co-founder of OpenSea, has secured $40 million in funding for his new AI venture, OpenRouter.

The move signals a major pivot from Web3 to AI, blending blockchain pedigree with artificial… pic.twitter.com/LvyKGhggzm

— Crypto Town Hall (@Crypto_TownHall) June 27, 2025

The platform works as a marketplace and routing system for large language models (LLMs), aggregating options from providers such as OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic. The goal is to allow developers to choose the ideal model for each task, optimizing costs, performance and privacy. The company monetizes the service by charging small fees per request and allowing users to make payments via credits.

Anjney Midha, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, highlighted the startup’s proposition: “AI stacks are fragmenting. OpenRouter is unifying them with one API, one contract, and industry-leading uptime — exactly the kind of infrastructure that defines new categories.”

For Atallah, the biggest challenge for companies adopting LLMs is dealing with rising costs and integration complexity. “Inference is the fastest-growing cost for forward-thinking companies, and it often comes from four or more different models. […] They are moving away from homegrown solutions and adopting OpenRouter so they can focus on their domain-specific problems rather than LLM integration,” he said.

Atallah co-founded OpenSea in 2018 alongside Devin Finzer and left the company in July 2022, during the decline in activity in the NFT market. His focus now is on consolidating OpenRouter as a reference in infrastructure for artificial intelligence. The new venture was started together with Louis Vichy, with whom he shares the leadership of the startup.