Stripe to Acquire OpenRouter for More Than $7 Billion
Stripe to Acquire OpenRouter for More Than $7 Billion #
Stripe has agreed to acquire OpenRouter, the AI model-routing startup, for more than $7 billion, Bloomberg reported Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified. The final price could change before the deal closes. Neither company has confirmed the transaction publicly. A Stripe spokesperson said the company does not comment on rumor or speculation; OpenRouter also declined to comment.
The deal comes three months after OpenRouter closed a $113 million Series B at a reported valuation of $1.3 billion, meaning Stripe is paying more than five times that figure. Investors in that round included Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures and Alphabet’s venture arm CapitalG. The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported that the two companies were in acquisition talks, initially citing a potential price of around $10 billion.
OpenRouter was founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah, who previously co-founded the NFT marketplace OpenSea. The platform acts as a single gateway through which developers can access more than 400 AI models and route queries to whichever option best matches their performance or cost requirements. It currently serves around 8 million users globally. Atallah has described the startup as the “Stripe for AI,” pointing to its role as a neutral aggregation layer that insulates customers from dependence on any single AI vendor.
The acquisition fits a broader push by Stripe to build infrastructure for the emerging AI economy. Over the past 18 months the company acquired Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure firm, for $1.1 billion; bought embedded crypto wallet provider Privy; and absorbed Metronome, a usage-based billing platform whose customers include OpenAI and Anthropic. Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025, up 34 percent year-on-year.
The strategic logic centers on the routing layer that determines which AI model handles each request. As AI applications generate their own transactions, purchasing compute, triggering API calls and paying for data, that layer occupies a commercially significant position in the stack. Owning OpenRouter would give Stripe visibility into model selection decisions that come before those payments, not just the payments themselves. For a company that has already integrated its billing infrastructure with the largest AI labs, acquiring the gateway above those labs represents a further vertical integration. At more than $7 billion, the deal would rank as Stripe’s largest acquisition to date.
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