OpenRouter Inc., which sells builders a single door into greater than 400 synthetic intelligence fashions, has agreed to phrases to promote itself to Stripe Inc. for north of $7 billion, in line with a report at present from Bloomberg.
The corporate’s pitch is that one integration outlives any single mannequin. A buyer writes to OpenRouter as soon as, then swaps between OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC or a less expensive open-weight various with out touching the code, with the router selecting on value, velocity or which supplier occurs to be up. It takes a minimize of about 5% of the inference spend passing via it and says it has roughly 8 million customers.
Stripe has neither confirmed nor denied the report, telling TechCrunch solely that it doesn’t touch upon “rumors or hypothesis.”
OpenRouter was based in 2023 by Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy. Atallah has described the corporate as “Stripe for AI,” on the argument {that a} single entry level throughout mannequin suppliers removes integration work and blocks lock-in.
Weekly throughput hit 25 trillion tokens by Might, 5 occasions the determine six months earlier, and OpenRouter reckoned that tempo would carry it previous a quadrillion tokens earlier than the yr is out. Income is a a lot smaller quantity: about $50 million annualized as of March, in opposition to roughly $19 million when 2025 closed.
Alphabet Inc.’s progress fund CapitalG LP led the $113 million Collection B that OpenRouter introduced on Might 26, with Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures alongside. The spherical was raised on a $1.3 billion valuation, greater than double the determine a yr earlier.
Stripe co-authored the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI and has been OpenRouter’s funds supplier since at the very least January, when the 2 introduced a token-billing integration that meters mannequin utilization and costs it robotically. Inference is bought in metered models and reconciled throughout dozens of suppliers. The routing layer additionally sits on knowledge about which fashions builders select and at what value, spanning closed and open-weight suppliers.
OpenRouter competes with open-source routing initiatives reminiscent of LiteLLM and with routing options the foremost cloud suppliers have folded into their very own mannequin providers.
Stripe has made a run of infrastructure acquisitions over the previous two years. It paid about $1.1 billion for stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge Community Inc. in a deal that closed in February 2025 and purchased crypto pockets supplier Privy Inc. that June. In July it joined non-public fairness agency Introduction Worldwide L.P. in a bid of greater than $53 billion to take PayPal Holdings Inc. non-public. A February tender supply valued Stripe at $159 billion.
Picture: OpenRouter
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