TrustedRouter said this week it closed a $6 million seed round led by Sierra Ventures, six weeks after launching publicly, positioning itself in the growing model routing market.
The company aims to differentiate by offering end-to-end encryption and verifiable confidential computing for some open-weight models, which TrustedRouter says prevents both the company and the data centers running the models from reading a customer’s prompts or outputs. That contrasts with closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which TrustedRouter says do not currently offer the same guarantees. CEO Joseph Perla added that OpenRouter also does not provide those protections: “Security is just a pure baseline. It just has to be secure.”
Perla, a former Facebook engineer and early Lyft hire who has founded and sold several startups, said TrustedRouter seeks to win customers that face rising AI bills while prioritizing data privacy. “If we all encrypt our AI chats,” Perla said, “we can slow down” the cycle in which frontier labs absorb user data to train future models.
Model routing market and competitors
The biggest player in the routing space is OpenRouter, which raised a $12.5 million seed round in February 2025 and has since agreed to sell to payments provider Stripe in a $7.5 billion deal. TrustedRouter is entering a market where developers and companies are looking to switch between different AI models to cut costs and reduce dependence on any single model maker.
Perla said Chinese AI models, including those from DeepSeek, Zhipu, and Moonshot, are among the most popular on TrustedRouter’s platform. He also expressed a desire for a more vibrant American open-source ecosystem, noting recent Western open-weight releases from Reflection AI and Mistral and citing Meta’s Thursday release of what it called “the most capable US open-weight model to date.”
Looking ahead, Perla outlined a plan to build a marketplace he calls the “New York Token Exchange,” where thousands of models from thousands of hosting providers — any data center willing to run an open model — would compete to serve each request. In that vision, AI tokens could become a commodity traded with futures, hedges, and price indices similar to oil or electricity, and new open-weight releases could stage “model IPOs.”
An accompanying assessment noted clear demand from developers for routing services and suggested TrustedRouter could appeal to the most privacy-obsessed customers. Whether the company moves from niche to mass market may depend on how competitive open-weight models become; if they continue to lag behind closed competitors at OpenAI and Anthropic, some enterprises and developers may accept higher cost and limited encryption to obtain better outputs for advanced tasks.
