Stripe Plans to Acquire AI Startup OpenRouter

Stripe said Wednesday that it plans to acquire the startup OpenRouter, as the fintech company expands into the artificial intelligence model market.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but The New York Times, citing a person familiar with the matter, said the price tag is about $7.5 billion, with $1.5 billion allocated to OpenRouter's founders. Less than three months ago OpenRouter raised $113 million at a valuation of of about $1.3 billion.

Stripe declined to comment.

OpenRouter has become popular with developers seeking to use AI models, particularly those considered non-proprietary and available for free. Many of these so-called open-weight AI models stem from Chinese labs like DeepSeek and Z.ai, which have gained steam among developers for generally being more cost-efficient relative to proprietary AI models from U.S. companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

In a blog post about the deal, Stripe noted that it's been working with companies to "optimize their token costs and route tokens efficiently," referring to a kind of metric used to measure AI model usage. Stripe said it's difficult to manage AI costs relative to performance because of the rapid "pace at which models are released and repriced."

Stripe has become one of the most valuable startups in the world, with a valuation of close to $160 billion as of earlier this year, thanks mostly to its online payment technology that's become ubiquitous in many markets. Last year it bolstered its exposure to crypto with the $1.1 billion acquisition of stablecoin platform Bridge.

The AI market is much bigger and growing much faster.

"Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI, and together with OpenRouter we'll help businesses maximize profitability by routing their requests intelligently and spending their tokens efficiently," Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said in a statement.

OpenRouter said in a blog post that combining with Stripe will help with its overall vision of "a healthy AI ecosystem where many models thrive, where AI neurodiversity is a strength, where a lab or an inference provider with a breakthrough can reach millions of developers, and where no single model becomes the default by inertia."