Yeah they definitely belong in the same space. Nexus is an LLM Gateway, but early on, the focus has been on MCP: aggregation, authentication, and a smart approach to tool selection. There is that paper, and a lot of anecdotal evidence, pointing to LLMs not coping well with a selection of tools that is too large: https://arxiv.org/html/2411.09613v1

So Nexus takes a tool search based approach to solving that, among other cool things.

Disclaimer: I don't work on Nexus directly, but I do work at Grafbase.