Stripe in advanced talks to buy AI gateway OpenRouter for about $10 billion, WSJ reported. OpenRouter's revenue hit $50 million as it routes 1.5 quadrillion tokens a year.
Stripe is in advanced talks to buy OpenRouter, an artificial intelligence startup, for roughly $10 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported. An agreement could be announced soon, though talks could still fall through or another buyer could emerge.
The price tag marks a sharp jump for the company. OpenRouter was valued at $1.3 billion in May, after a $113 million funding round led by CapitalG, Google's venture arm. A $10 billion sale would value the startup at nearly eight times that figure in under three months.
OpenRouter does not build its own AI models. Instead, it acts as a gateway, giving developers a single connection point to more than 400 models from over 60 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and DeepSeek. A company can switch models without rebuilding its software each time.
The platform now handles an estimated 1.5 quadrillion tokens a year, according to Menlo Ventures, one of its investors. More than 8 million developers use it. Menlo estimates that volume equals 15% to 30% of Google's total token traffic, 20% to 40% of OpenAI's traffic, and more than half of Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry service.
OpenRouter's revenue model has fueled that growth. It does not charge more than the underlying AI companies. Instead, it makes money from a small fee when developers add funds to their accounts. Sacra estimates that business reached $50 million in yearly revenue by March, up from about $19 million at the end of 2025.
Stripe already runs a significant share of OpenRouter's financial operations. Last year, Stripe announced that OpenRouter uses its invoicing, tax and fraud detection tools. OpenRouter also uses Stripe to accept payments, including credit cards and regional methods like Alipay and Google Pay. That existing relationship makes a full acquisition a natural step.
This would be Stripe's second AI-related purchase in less than a year. In January, Stripe completed its acquisition of Metronome, a company that tracks usage in real time and turns it into bills instantly. Metronome's customers included OpenAI, Anthropic and Nvidia.
Metronome and OpenRouter solve two parts of the same problem. Metronome handles billing after a request is processed. OpenRouter decides which model should handle the request in the first place, based on price, speed and quality. Together, they give Stripe a full stack for AI payments and routing.
The deal would deepen Stripe's role in the AI infrastructure layer, giving it control over both the payment rail and the model selection logic that developers rely on.
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