Sapiom raises $35M to slash AI token costs for startups

Polsia, a San Francisco startup that runs swarms of AI agents to help operate other businesses, faced a crisis of scale this year. The company's projected annual revenue skyrocketed from $100,000 to $10 million, but its token spending on Anthropic's models kept pace, reaching $1.2 million per month — a cost structure that made deployment impossible despite strong demand. Founder of Polsia turned to Sapiom, a routing startup that optimizes AI costs, to evaluate and restructure the spending. After running tests, Sapiom reduced Polsia's monthly token bill tenfold, to approximately $100,000 per month. "It's just unsustainable," said Ilan Zerbib, Sapiom's founder and CEO, noting that startups cannot deploy their products profitably at the rates charged by frontier-model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Sapiom's solution centers on automatic routing: a single API key that intelligently directs each request to the most cost-efficient AI model for that specific task. The company is now launching this model router, putting it in direct competition with OpenRouter, the largest name in the routing space. Sapiom serves a few thousand customers and operates differently from most competitors: it hosts open weight models (AI models publicly released by creators) on its own server racks in a San Jose data center. Most routing firms do not own infrastructure and instead act as middlemen, inserting themselves between customers and other AI providers. Critically, Sapiom does not charge a markup on the models it provides; instead, it charges customers directly for the compute resources it consumes. This cost pass-through model gives customers savings that competitors cannot match. To fuel expansion, Sapiom raised $35 million in a Series A led venture fund Dragonfly, with Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi leading the round. The company had previously raised $15 million in a seed round led by Accel earlier this year.