Industry
Stripe reportedly buying OpenRouter for more than $7B
Bloomberg reports Stripe agreed to buy model router OpenRouter for over $7B; Stripe has not confirmed the deal.
SiliconANGLE, citing Bloomberg, reports OpenRouter agreed to sell to Stripe for more than $7 billion. Stripe told TechCrunch it does not comment on rumors. Treat the price and close as unconfirmed until a filing or company statement.
Reported facts
- OpenRouter routes one API across 400+ models and takes about 5% of inference spend; about 8 million users
- Founded 2023 by Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy; Atallah has called it “Stripe for AI”
- May 2026 Series B: $113 million led by CapitalG at a $1.3 billion valuation
- Weekly throughput about 25 trillion tokens by May 2026; ~$50 million annualized revenue as of March, up from ~$19 million at end of 2025
- Stripe already co-authored the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI and has been OpenRouter’s payments provider
Why it matters
A payments company buying the default multi-model router would sit next to ai-gateway as a commercial routing layer, not a model lab. The valuation jump from $1.3B (May) to a reported >$7B (August) is the number to re-check when the deal is confirmed or denied.