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Stripe buys OpenRouter for a reported $7.5B, betting the AI stack pays by the token

The payments giant outbid Databricks for the model-routing gateway three months after it was valued at $1.3 billion.

By Ben Krauss · Daily desk lead ·

Stripe confirmed on Wednesday that it has acquired OpenRouter, the model-routing gateway that funnels API calls to more than 400 models from over 80 providers, in a deal the New York Times pegged at $7.5 billion, Axios put above $8 billion mostly in stock, and the Wall Street Journal originally described as opening nearer $10 billion. TechCrunch reports Stripe outbid Databricks. Closing is expected within weeks.

The valuation math is the story. In May, OpenRouter raised a $113 million Series B led by CapitalG, with Nvidia’s NVentures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Menlo Ventures participating, at a $1.3 billion mark. Three months later it’s changing hands for roughly six times that. Annualized revenue, per SiliconAngle, went from about $19 million at the end of 2025 to roughly $50 million by March, on a platform now processing more than 10 trillion tokens daily and keeping around 5% of inference spend. Founders take home a reported $1.5 billion, investors $6 billion.

CEO Patrick Collison framed it in Stripe’s preferred idiom: “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.” OpenRouter told customers its “product, mission, and current commitments remain unchanged.”

PitchBook analyst Franco Granda called the deal “Stripe’s deliberate attempt to embed itself into capital flows in the AI era.” That’s the read. Stripe, valued near $160 billion earlier this year and fending off Rippling, Ramp, and every fintech that suddenly does payroll, bought Bridge for $1.1 billion last year to sit under stablecoin rails. Now it’s buying the toll booth between roughly 10 million developers and the model layer, run by OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah.

The pattern is the point: whichever abstraction the next decade prices in dollars, tokens, or stablecoins, Stripe intends to be the meter.

Sources