3T+ token/day Coinbase of the inference economy

We first covered OpenRouter at $100M GMV and $5M annualized revenue in May 2025 as the fast-growing universal API for LLMs.

Key points from our June 2026 update via Sacra AI:

With the shift from chatbots to AI agents driving ~7x more inference, Sacra estimates OpenRouter hit $50M in annualized revenue in March 2026, up from $19M at the end of 2025 (+1,840% YoY), growing from processing 1T tokens/day as of February 2026 to doing 3T+ tokens/day across 8M developers as of May, announcing last week its $113M Series B a $1.3B valuation (CapitalG) for a 26x forward revenue multiple.
As model routing has become core AI infrastructure for multi-model building and multi-inference provider routing, OpenRouter has attracted competition from self-hosted & open-source LLM gateway startups like LiteLLM & Helicone (acquired by Mintlify in March 2026), app-layer developer platforms like Vercel (Vercel AI Gateway, launched August 2025) and universal API middleware like Merge (Merge Gateway, launched April 2026).
Security has stepped into the foreground as the March 2026 supply chain attack on LiteLLM debilitated customers like Mercor ($1B annualized revenue in February 2026, +2,097% YoY in 2025) with allegedly 1TB of private source code, 3TB of Mercor customer data and downstream secret API keys exfiltrated, pointing towards long term consolidation around trusted, managed providers—not unlike how Coinbase won retail crypto by not getting hacked.

For more, check out this other research from our platform:

OpenRouter at $100M GMV