Payment system Stripe to spend over $7 billion on a key AI service

Payment company Stripe has agreed to acquire OpenRouter, a platform that provides developers a unified access to hundreds of artificial intelligence models. According to Bloomberg, the deal value will exceed $7 billion.

For Stripe, this will mean a significant expansion of business beyond traditional online payments. OpenRouter essentially works as an intermediary between developers and AI model providers: instead of separate integration with each company, customers can use models from different developers through one service and switch between them depending on price, speed, and required capabilities.

The platform already has over 5 million developer users and provides access to hundreds of models through a single interface. Stripe and OpenRouter have long cooperated: OpenRouter uses Stripe's payment infrastructure for billing, payment processing, tax calculation, and fraud prevention. 

Thus, Stripe is buying not just another AI startup, but a part of the infrastructure through which companies pay for and use computing resources of various models. This fits well into Stripe's strategy for developing services for the AI economy, where payments are increasingly tied to actual usage - for example, the number of processed tokens.

Negotiations about a possible deal became known back in July. Then The Wall Street Journal reported that Stripe was in talks to buy OpenRouter, and the company's value during the sale could reach about $10 billion. At the same time, the latest known valuation of the startup itself was only $1.3 billion.

According to The Information, at the end of July OpenRouter was already generating about $140 million in annualized revenue based on current run-rate - almost three times more than in the spring. The potential multi-billion-dollar deal price therefore primarily reflects expectations of rapid growth in the AI infrastructure market, not just the company's current financial performance.

OpenRouter was founded in 2023. Its role is growing along with the number of available AI models: companies find it increasingly difficult to tie their products to a single provider, so routing services allow using different models for different tasks and changing them without rebuilding the entire product. WSJ previously noted that OpenRouter works with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and open alternates.

For Stripe, acquiring OpenRouter could combine two parts of this market - routing requests to models and paying for their usage. The company is already developing its own tools for metering consumption of AI services and billing based on used resources.

Based on materials from: Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Stripe