Stripe Will Acquire AI Model OpenRouter For Over $7 Billion

IBL News | New York

OpenRouter, which provides developers with a single gateway to more than 400 AI models, agreed to be acquired by Stripe Inc. for more than $7 billion, according to a Bloomberg report — although Stripe hasn’t confirmed it.

OpenRouter’s success is based on switching between OpenAI, Anthropic, or a cheaper open-weight alternative without touching the code, with the router choosing based on cost, speed, or which provider is up. It takes about 5% of the inference spend passing through it and says it has roughly 8 million users.

OpenRouter was founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy. Atallah described the company as “Stripe for AI,” arguing that a single access point across model providers removes integration work and blocks lock-in.

Weekly throughput hit 25 trillion tokens by May, five times the figure six months earlier. Revenue is about $50 million annualized as of March, against roughly $19 million when 2025 closed.

Alphabet Inc.’s growth fund, CapitalG LP, led the $113 million Series B that OpenRouter announced on May 26, with Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures alongside. The round was raised on a $1.3 billion valuation, more than double the figure a year earlier.

Stripe co-authored the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI and has been OpenRouter’s payments provider since at least January, when the two announced a token-billing integration that meters model usage and automatically prices it.

OpenRouter competes with open-source routing projects such as LiteLLM and with the routing features set by major cloud providers.

Stripe paid about $1.1 billion for stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge Network Inc. in February 2025 and also acquired crypto wallet provider Privy Inc. In July, it joined private equity firm Advent International L.P. in a bid of more than $53 billion to take PayPal Holdings Inc. private. A February tender offer valued Stripe at $159 billion.