LLM gateway and routing startup landscape - founded 2023, funding, and what they actually do

total raised (cohort)

~$90M

all founded

2023

doing complexity routing

0

openrouter annualized spend

$100M+

OpenRouter

founded 2023

~$60M
a16z * Menlo * Sequoia
Provider traffic routing. Routes your named model to cheapest/fastest cloud endpoint. Zero prompt inspection.

Portkey

founded 2023

$18M
Lightspeed * Elevation
Gateway + observability. Rule-based conditional routing (user tier, content policy). Acquired by Palo Alto Networks.

LiteLLM

founded 2023

$1.6M
Y Combinator
Self-hosted proxy. Translates provider APIs to OpenAI format. Budget controls, RBAC. No intelligence layer.

Helicone

founded 2023

$500K
Y Combinator
Observability-first, thin proxy second. Logging, cost tracking, latency analytics. Acquired by Mintlify.

Not Diamond

founded 2023

~$10M
undisclosed
Closest to prompt routing - but routes on task type (code vs. math vs. general), not computational complexity.

what all of them do

Given a model name - pick which provider serves it. None inspect whether a prompt requires $0.015/1k tokens or $0.0002/1k tokens.

the unoccupied slot

Pre-generation complexity estimation - model tier selection. Validated in research. Zero production deployments. Zero funded startups.