AI

OpenRouter Inc., which sells developers a single door into more than 400 artificial intelligence models, has agreed to terms to sell itself to Stripe Inc. for north of $7 billion, according to a report today from Bloomberg.

The company’s pitch is that one integration outlives any single model. A customer writes to OpenRouter once, then swaps between OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC or a cheaper open-weight alternative without touching the code, with the router picking on cost, speed or which provider happens to be up. It takes a cut of about 5% of the inference spend passing through it and says it has roughly 8 million users.

Stripe has neither confirmed nor denied the report, telling TechCrunch only that it does not comment on “rumors or speculation.”

OpenRouter was founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy. Atallah has described the company as “Stripe for AI,” on the argument that a single access point across model providers removes integration work and blocks lock-in.

Weekly throughput hit 25 trillion tokens by May, five times the figure six months earlier, and OpenRouter reckoned that pace would carry it past a quadrillion tokens before the year is out. Revenue is a much smaller number: about $50 million annualized as of March, against roughly $19 million when 2025 closed.

Alphabet Inc.’s growth fund CapitalG LP led the $113 million Series B that OpenRouter announced on May 26, with Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures alongside. The round was raised on a $1.3 billion valuation, more than double the figure a year earlier.

Stripe co-authored the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI and has been OpenRouter’s payments provider since at least January, when the two announced a token-billing integration that meters model usage and prices it automatically. Inference is sold in metered units and reconciled across dozens of suppliers. The routing layer also sits on data about which models developers choose and at what price, spanning closed and open-weight providers.

OpenRouter competes with open-source routing projects such as LiteLLM and with routing features the major cloud providers have folded into their own model services.

Stripe has made a run of infrastructure acquisitions over the past two years. It paid about $1.1 billion for stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge Network Inc. in a deal that closed in February 2025 and bought crypto wallet provider Privy Inc. that June. In July it joined private equity firm Advent International L.P. in a bid of more than $53 billion to take PayPal Holdings Inc. private. A February tender offer valued Stripe at $159 billion.