Stripe announced that it had reached an agreement to purchase OpenRouter, but did not disclose the terms of the deal. Bloomberg sources said the deal was worth more than $7 billion. According to the NYT interlocutor, the service paid $ 7.5 billion: of which $ 1.5 billion will be received by the founders of OpenRouter, the rest by investors. According to data from PitchBook, cited by the newspaper, the startup raised a total of $164 million, including funds from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Nvidia, and Google’s investment division. In May 2026, according to a source, investors valued it at $1.3 billion.

Founded in 2023, OpenRouter allows developers to access AI models through a single platform. CEO Alex Atalla described it as “an AI‑based equivalent of Stripe” that processes all payments through a single access point. On X, he said that the service will continue to operate as before: under the same name, with the same product, the same roadmap and mission, but together with Stripe it will be able to develop faster. According to Atalla, OpenRouter processes over 10 trillion tokens per day, more than 400 AI models are connected to the service, and the audience consists of 10 million developers and companies.

The deal reflects the growing interest of major technology and financial players in artificial intelligence infrastructure. For Stripe, acquiring OpenRouter opens up access to the rapidly growing market of AI services and allows it to strengthen its position in the developer ecosystem, while the startup itself gains resources for accelerated scaling without changing its product and mission.