Stripe Strikes More Than $7 Billion OpenRouter Deal
Deal would give payments firm a foothold in AI model routing as developers seek to manage inference costs.
Topics
News
- Temasek, Seraphim Back Pixxel in $100 Million Round
- UN Rights Chief Warns Advanced AI Could Threaten Humanity
- Tata-owned JLR to Cut About 4,000 Bobs Amid Tariff, China Pressure
- Anthropic Walks Away From $6 Billion Decart Deal
- Hyundai India Targets 20% Women in Executive Workforce by 2030
- Security Breach Drains $320 Million in Bitcoin From Liquid Network
Stripe has agreed to acquire AI model routing platform OpenRouter in a deal valued at more than $7 billion, Bloomberg reported, pushing the payments company deeper into the infrastructure behind generative AI.
The deal comes only months after OpenRouter raised $113 million at a reported $1.3 billion valuation. Axios separately put the acquisition price at more than $8 billion in cash and stock. Neither Stripe nor OpenRouter has publicly announced the transaction.
Founded in 2023, OpenRouter gives developers a single interface for accessing and switching between AI models from different providers. Its platform currently lists more than 500 models from over 80 providers and says it serves more than 10 million users.
That position has become more valuable as companies increasingly use several AI models rather than commit to one supplier. OpenRouter can route requests between models based on factors such as price and availability and provide alternatives when a provider experiences an outage.
Stripe was already closely tied to the startup before the reported acquisition. OpenRouter uses Stripe for payments, invoicing, tax management and fraud controls, while the two companies have worked together on usage-based billing as AI inference prices change.
The deal would broaden Stripe beyond its core role processing online payments and give it a position in deciding how developers buy and consume AI computing services.
OpenRouter has raised $164 million in total, according to Axios. Its investors include CapitalG, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures and NVentures, Nvidia’s venture capital arm, as well as the venture arms of ServiceNow, MongoDB, Snowflake and Databricks.
