Stripe payment company has signed a deal to acquire the startup OpenRouter, the amount of which exceeded seven billion dollars. This was reported by Bloomberg. OpenRouter is a kind of payment gateway between users and a variety of artificial intelligence models, providing a single point of interaction with them. According to the newspaper, the deal was actually completed, but the parties did not announce it publicly and refused to comment on the publication. It is noteworthy that information about a potential agreement between the companies emerged as early as July, and at that time, according to the WSJ, the figure in question was ten billion dollars. At the same time, OpenRouter’s last disclosed valuation was only one billion three hundred million dollars, and at the end of May 2026, the company raised one hundred and thirteen million dollars in a Series B round. This deal is intended to significantly expand Stripe’s capabilities in the field of artificial intelligence. Thanks to this agreement, the company gains control over the routing layer, which, according to various estimates, accounts for up to twenty‑five percent of all calls to third‑party AI models via programmatic interfaces. OpenRouter entered the market in 2023 and provides customers with access to hundreds of models, handling routing, payments, billing, as well as monitoring expenses and token limits. As of the end of May 2026, the platform supported more than four hundred models and served over eight million customers, processing about twenty‑five trillion tokens weekly.

The deal is also significant in the context of the development of inference infrastructure and the Venice project. In 2025, OpenRouter became a staker of the VVV token and connected Venice as a provider of computing power for its users. The possible sale of OpenRouter to Stripe for more than seven billion dollars becomes a notable benchmark for the entire AI infrastructure segment, demonstrating the multi‑billion‑dollar value of such companies for major strategic buyers. Meanwhile, on August 17, Venice increased the target volume of the DIEM token from 38,500 to 39,000 units. It was also previously reported that Stripe, together with Advent, is considering the possibility of purchasing PayPal for more than $53 billion as part of a large‑scale reorganization of its business.