Stripe reportedly in exclusive talks to acquire OpenRouter for $10B

On August 7, multiple media outlets reported that Stripe is in exclusive talks to acquire AI model aggregator OpenRouter at a valuation of around $10 billion. OpenRouter had attracted acquisition interest from several large tech companies, but Stripe is now in exclusive negotiations. The deal would put Stripe directly into the AI infrastructure layer.

OpenRouter was founded in New York in 2023 by Alex Atallah, formerly co-founder of OpenSea. The platform connects more than 70 model and inference providers, offering a single API to over 400 open and closed models. OpenRouter serves more than 8 million developers, processes over 200 trillion tokens per month, has annualized revenue of around $140 million, and gross margin near 70%.

OpenRouter closed a Series B in May at a valuation of around $1.3 billion. In the more than two months since, the reported acquisition price has jumped to $10 billion, a roughly 7x increase. Stripe itself is valued at around $159 billion with $3.2 billion in cash.

While negotiating with OpenRouter, Stripe is also teaming up with private equity firm Advent International on a more than $53 billion bid for PayPal. If the OpenRouter deal closes, Stripe would control the value chain from e-commerce payments to AI inference, with every token transaction flowing through its payment rails.