Stripe seals its OpenRouter deal for a reported $7.5bn or more

Stripe has agreed to buy OpenRouter, the startup whose software helps companies route their spending across hundreds of AI models. The payments firm confirmed the deal on Wednesday, making official an acquisition the press first reported earlier this month.

Neither company put a figure on the deal. Outside reporting has, and the numbers do not quite agree. The New York Times said Stripe is paying $7.5 billion, citing a person with knowledge of the terms. Of that, $1.5 billion goes to OpenRouter’s founders and $6 billion to its investors, it said. Axios, citing its own sources, put the price higher, at more than $8 billion, mostly in stock.

Whatever the exact number, it is a sharp markup. Investors valued OpenRouter at about $1.3 billion in a funding round earlier this year, according to Bloomberg. Its backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Nvidia and CapitalG, one of Alphabet’s venture arms. If the New York Times figure is right, they are cashing out at several times that valuation. And it is only months later.

What OpenRouter does

OpenRouter runs a single gateway to the AI market. Through one interface, developers can reach more than 400 models from over 80 providers. They can compare them, and send each request to whichever model fits best on price, speed and reliability. The company says it now processes more than 10 trillion tokens a day. It serves over 10 million developers and businesses, it adds.

That scale is the point of the business. OpenRouter began in 2023 with a handful of models, and its token volume has since grown many times over, doubling roughly every few months, its backers say. Big new models now often appear on the platform first, and the AI researcher Andrej Karpathy has called it the “transfer switch” of AI, a nod to its role in directing traffic between systems.

Tokens are the unit AI models bill by, roughly a fragment of a word. As companies’ AI use has climbed, so has their spend on tokens. Routing has become a way to keep the bill down. The idea is to send simple tasks to cheaper, often open-source models, and reserve the costly frontier models for hard ones. OpenRouter also lets customers fail over to a backup model when a provider goes down.

That approach has grown more attractive as strong open-source models have arrived, many of them from China. The Times pointed to Kimi, from the startup Moonshot AI, as one such example. Models like it are fuelling companies’ interest in switching between models for different jobs.

Why Stripe wanted it

Stripe already sits between businesses and their money, optimising payments, authorisation and fraud. It has framed OpenRouter as the same idea for AI spend. Chief executive Patrick Collison said tokens are “the central currency for companies building with AI,” in a statement. The pair would help firms “spend their tokens efficiently,” he said.

The move extends a push Stripe has made into the AI economy, including a Token Billing product it launched last year. OpenRouter’s founder, Alex Atallah, said intelligence would be “multi-model,” with no single model best for every task. Developers, he said, needed a neutral layer to manage them all. Atallah previously co-founded the NFT marketplace OpenSea.

Neutrality is central to OpenRouter’s pitch, and to the question the deal raises. The company says its routing decisions serve the user, not any single model or provider, and that this will not change under Stripe. Stripe, for its part, said OpenRouter is already used by firms including Nvidia, Zoom and the coding startup Lovable.

OpenRouter said it would keep operating as it does now, under the same name, product and roadmap. The company launched in 2023, and has grown fast since. The deal still needs to clear customary closing conditions, and should close in the coming weeks.

Stripe’s wider bet

Stripe is one of the largest private tech companies, and it has stayed off the public markets. Its founders have long said they prefer to keep it private. Being private suits a moment it sees as pivotal, the company told investors. In a letter to investors this week, seen by Axios, it called the start of the year “the beginning of the singularity.” That is its term for a major inflection point. First-half revenue rose 41 percent from a year earlier, the company said. It added that 88 percent of the Forbes AI 50, including OpenAI and Anthropic, build on its platform.

An employee share sale in February valued the firm at $159 billion, up from $91.5 billion a year before, according to Axios. It is also pursuing a much larger deal, a bid for PayPal with the investment firm Advent, reported at about $53 billion.

The routing market Stripe is buying into is getting crowded. Smaller firms such as Switchboard, Concentrate AI and Requesty offer similar services, and larger AI companies are building their own routers. In recent weeks, the New York Times noted, companies from Ramp to Cursor have launched routing tools of their own, part of a wider scramble to control AI spending.

Buying the largest independent router is Stripe’s answer to that scramble. It removes a fast-growing rival layer and folds it into the payments stack. The deal is also one of the first big acquisitions of the AI-infrastructure era, and, given how fast money is moving through the sector, it is unlikely to be the last.