OpenClaw's Biggest Winner: How OpenRouter Quietly Makes Money Using "Model Aggregation"

Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

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Statement: This article is a repost. Readers can obtain more information through the original link. If the author has any objections to the form of reposting, please contact us, and we will make modifications as per the author’s request. Reposting is only for information sharing, does not constitute any investment advice, and does not represent the views and positions of Wu Says. OpenClaw is gaining popularity, but the company quietly making money in this wave of hype is one you may not have heard of:

OpenRouter.

Using OpenClaw requires integrating various AI models to function, with Claude, GPT, and DeepSeek each having their own fees and interfaces. What OpenRouter does is package these models together, allowing you to use them uniformly, making a profit from the price difference.

The person behind this business is Alex Atallah. His company recently raised $40 million led by a16z, and is now valued at $500 million.

You may not know that his last company was OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace in the world, which at its peak was valued at over $13 billion.

However, he chose to exit during the peak of the NFT boom, and a few months later, the NFT market collapsed.

Now, he’s making money again in this AI wave.

From liquidity aggregation to large model aggregation

Alex Atallah graduated from Stanford’s computer science department.

In 2018, he co-founded OpenSea with Devin Finzer. The business was straightforward: others mint NFTs, and they provide a place for people to buy and sell, taking a 2.5% cut on each transaction.

OpenSea does not produce NFTs or speculate on them; it simply provides a shelf to aggregate liquidity.

In 2021, the NFT boom emerged, with popular NFTs like Bored Apes becoming cultural symbols. At that time, OpenSea’s monthly transaction volume peaked at over $5 billion, and Forbes estimated that he and Finzer’s combined net worth was $2.2 billion.

In July 2022, he resigned as CTO, stating that he wanted to do something new.

What happened afterward is well-known: NFTs crashed, and the market completely froze, leaving OpenSea’s own business in disarray. However, someone always pays for the feast, and Alex exited before the music stopped.

In 2023, he started working on something called OpenRouter. In simple terms, it is:

A large model aggregation routing platform that places the APIs of hundreds of models behind a single interface, allowing developers to access them while taking a 5% fee.

You might ask, why not just go directly to OpenAI or Anthropic to call Claude or GPT?

Of course, you can.

But now, it’s likely that no one uses just one model; they might use Claude for coding, Gemini for research, and delegate cost-saving tasks to DeepSeek, each requiring separate registration, separate funding, and different interface formats…

Not to mention that many users who want to use Claude and GPT cannot connect directly to the API from within the country.

Thus, OpenRouter becomes the path of least resistance. One interface, over 500 models, a unified format, automatic switching—one key to solve it all.

When you use OpenClaw, you might not have noticed that the default provider in the configuration file was OpenRouter.

Source: Zhihu user Feng Control Alchemist

When you call Claude or DeepSeek, the request first goes to OpenRouter, then routes to the model vendors. Even OpenClaw’s documentation states:

If the system does not recognize your API key format, it defaults to OpenRouter.

How fast is this business growing?

By October 2024, the money passing through OpenRouter each month is $800,000. By May 2025, this figure will become $8 million.

In seven months, a tenfold increase.

By the end of the year, the money passing through his hands will exceed $100 million. He takes a 5% cut, netting $5 million, with a team of fewer than ten people.

Source: sacra.com

a16z wrote an industry report based on his data titled “The AI Status of 100 Trillion Tokens”; Stripe specifically customized a billing system for him.

With this year’s explosive growth of OpenClaw, more developers and enthusiasts are flocking in, experimenting with various tokens, and inevitably needing to call various large models, which has further ignited OpenRouter’s business.

Moreover, a16z led the investment in this company, giving it a valuation of $500 million.

Once again, a shovel seller has become a shovel seller.

Different hot topics, similar models

If you closely observe Alex’s two businesses, you’ll find their structure is actually the same.

OpenSea’s business is not minting NFTs but providing a place for others’ minted NFTs, allowing buyers and sellers to trade, while taking a 2.5% cut. OpenRouter’s business does not involve training models but instead provides a place for others’ trained models, allowing developers to access them while taking a 5% cut.

This approach seems to have become his comfort zone; whether in NFTs or AI, the entire market structure is very similar:

The supply side is extremely fragmented, and the demand side buyers do not know where to find supply, while he stands in the middle as a shelf.

How fragmented was the NFT market in 2021? Dozens of chains, hundreds of project teams, tens of thousands of new series daily. If you wanted to buy a Bored Ape, you couldn’t go to each project’s official site and sift through them one by one. OpenSea brought them together for you to choose and buy, with sellers bidding to sell to you.

How fragmented will the large model market be in 2025? OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral, and countless others… There are at least a dozen mainstream companies, plus hundreds in the open-source community.

Today, using Claude to code might be best, but tomorrow Gemini might release a better search version, and the day after that DeepSeek might drop prices by half. Each switch requires modifying the interface.

Atallah himself once said something that clarified this logic:

“OpenSea consolidated a highly fragmented inventory into one place; today’s AI landscape is very similar to that.”

He does not need to know which NFT will appreciate, nor which model will succeed. He only needs to know one thing: the more fragmented the supply, the more valuable the intermediary becomes.

Moreover, interestingly, there is a temporal aspect.

When he left in July 2022, OpenSea’s valuation was still high, and although NFT monthly transaction volume had dropped from its peak, no one thought it would collapse. He expressed a desire to “create something new from zero to one.” Six months later, ChatGPT was released, marking the beginning of the large model era.

Did he see something or was he just lucky?

I don’t know. But one thing is certain:

When he registered OpenRouter at the beginning of 2023, there were almost no AI large model routing products on the market. By the time everyone realized the need for a unified interface, he was already there.

Last time, he did the same thing in the NFT space. By the time everyone rushed in, he was already the largest platform.

Does it matter whether AI is the hottest topic?

In every wave of hype, most people ask: What will be popular?

In 2021, it was which NFT would rise; in 2024, it will be which meme coin will multiply; in 2025, which AI application will emerge; in 2026, what can crawfish do.

Atallah’s question might be different. I think his thought process should be: regardless of what becomes popular, where will the money flow?

These two questions may seem similar, but they are entirely different bets.

Betting on “what will be popular” means you need to guess correctly once. Will Bored Apes rise, will PEPE multiply, will a certain AI product be the next ChatGPT? Guess right and you become rich; guess wrong and you lose it all. Most people’s experience falls into the latter.

Betting on “where the money flows” means you do not need to guess any specific one. If an NFT rises, trading occurs on OpenSea, and he collects the fees. The fiercer the AI model war, the more developers need a unified interface to switch back and forth, making OpenRouter busier.

Not betting on who wins, but betting on how long this battle will last.

Looking back, in every cycle, those who made the most money, regardless of the industry, are typically those platforms in this position.

Gold miners come and go, but water sellers keep making money.

However, I think just saying “selling water” or “selling shovels” isn’t enough. There are plenty of shovel sellers who have failed; Atallah has done something more specific: he consistently positions himself at the aggregation point.

It’s not enough to just create a tool and charge a toll. You need to be the one who brings together the fragmented supply. The more fragmented the supply, the higher the switching costs, and the more pricing power the aggregator holds.

This also explains why he entered the field early both times. Because aggregation businesses have a characteristic:

The early entrants secure the supply, making it difficult for later entrants to catch up.

So, summarizing Atallah’s exceptional ability into two statements:

First, do not guess who will win; just find the intersection that everyone must pass through. Second, when others have not yet realized the need for that intersection, he has already built the road.

Great people never pick tables.

Now, I feel there are two loud voices around me.

One says AI Agents are toys, and besides burning tokens, OpenClaw is useless; the other says this is yet another wave of AI hype, and no one will remember in three months.

Both viewpoints might be correct.

But for someone like Alex Atallah, it doesn’t really matter.

Whether OpenClaw is useful or not, he is still collecting money. Even if you think crawfish are uninteresting and uninstall them today, the tokens burned in the past two weeks have already passed through his hands.

Some people think NFTs are dirty, a Ponzi scheme, a scam. He built a company valued at $13.3 billion on it. Some think AI Agents are bubbles, speculative, and see no business model. He built a company valued at $500 million on it…

Great people probably do not need us to validate the sectors they are in.

He made money at the NFT table. He made money at the AI table. What the next table will be is anyone’s guess.

But I suspect he will still be at the door collecting tickets.