OpenRouter raised at a $1.3 billion valuation months ago, and Stripe's $7 billion deal hands the payments processor access to more than 400 AI models.
Stripe, the payments processor, finalized its acquisition of OpenRouter, an AI startup that decides which outside model answers each request, for more than $7 billion, Bloomberg News reported Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The startup raised money at a reported $1.3 billion valuation just months ago. Stripe's price is more than five times that. Bloomberg tied the purchase to business demand for cost-friendly AI and said the deal could give Stripe a stronger presence in AI.
Word of Stripe's interest surfaced last month, when initial reports put the offer near $10 billion.
OpenRouter, founded in 2023, builds no AI models of its own. It gives developers a single connection point to more than 400 models from over 60 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and DeepSeek. The single connection means a company can switch AI models without rebuilding its software each time, swapping in a cheaper or faster option when it wants. The routing call comes down to price and speed, along with the quality of the answer.
Stripe made another AI-related purchase this year, completing its acquisition of Metronome in January. Metronome and OpenRouter, PYMNTS wrote, “solve two different parts of the same problem, in a specific order.” Metronome answers how much a request costs and how it should be billed, questions that arise only after a model has handled the request. OpenRouter handles the earlier question: which model should take it. “One system measures what already happened. The other decides what happens next,” the report said.
PayPal, which ousted CEO Alex Chriss in January and named Enrique Lores, an HP executive, as his replacement, also drew interest from a group that included Stripe and Advent International. Talks began in July, and the group proposed a price PayPal decided was not sufficient.
Karen Webster, PYMNTS’s chief executive, wrote that the ouster was no surprise. PayPal’s market cap sat where it was a decade earlier, when the company broke off from eBay. “The big question now is why Lores and why now,” she wrote.
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