Stripe has finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter, the AI model gateway startup, for more than $7 billion, according to Bloomberg1,3,9. A source cited by the New York Times puts the price at $7.5 billion, with $1.5 billion going to OpenRouter's founders and $6 billion to investors6.
The deal values OpenRouter at more than five times the $1.3 billion valuation it carried when it raised a $113 million Series B in May, just roughly 90 days before the reported acquisition10,13. Backers of that round include Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Alphabet's CapitalG12. Andreessen Horowitz alone could make close to $1.5 billion from the sale, according to Business Insider8.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Stripe and OpenRouter were in acquisition talks, with a figure of around $10 billion surfacing at that time. The closed deal at more than $7 billion came in below that earlier reported figure.
OpenRouter, founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah, gives developers a single API to access and switch between more than 400 AI models — including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek — based on price, speed, or task requirements. The company claims 8 million global users. Atallah, who previously co-founded OpenSea and stepped down from that company in July 2022, described OpenRouter in May as "the equivalent of Stripe for AI" — a single access point that prevents vendor lock-in.
OpenRouter's last publicly reported revenue figure was $140 million annualized, with costs to serve its model-routing product at approximately $40 million annualized — yielding a roughly 70% gross profit margin. The startup was facilitating AI model usage at a rate of 250 trillion tokens per month, up from 50 trillion tokens per month in February.
OpenRouter already runs its payments on Stripe. The New York Times described the deal as uniting Stripe's payments business with OpenRouter's role in helping businesses direct their spending on AI models. Stripe said earlier this year that streaming payments in real time is an important part of its economic infrastructure for AI.
A Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company does not comment on rumors or speculation. Bloomberg's formal report confirmed the agreement without disclosing official terms5,7.
OpenRouter's pricing and product are unchanged for now, according to reporting from tbreak.com. Ramp, Cursor, and Databricks have all built or announced model routers of their own.
ANALYSIS The acquisition represents one of the largest AI infrastructure deals to date, pricing OpenRouter at roughly 50 times its annualized revenue. The transaction collapses the distance between payments infrastructure and AI model consumption into a single entity — Stripe gains a routing layer that sits between developers and every major model provider, while OpenRouter gains the distribution and billing backbone of a company valued at $171 billion. The presence of competing routing products from Ramp, Cursor, and Databricks suggests the model-gateway category is attracting broad interest, though OpenRouter's 8 million user base and 250 trillion monthly tokens give it a scale advantage that Stripe is now absorbing directly.