Stripe Scoops Up OpenRouter in $7 Billion AI Play

Stripe, a payment processing company, has acquired OpenRouter for over $7 billion. This deal marks Stripe's largest acquisition to date and its latest move into the AI space. OpenRouter routes traffic from around 8 million developers to more than 400 AI models and takes about 5% of the inference spend passing through it.

Stripe already processed OpenRouter's payments, so this deal folds AI metering and billing into a single pipeline that Stripe owns end-to-end. This gives Stripe a live read on enterprise AI spending across every major lab at once and allows it to capture value each time a developer trades an expensive flagship for a cheaper model.

The acquisition also hands Stripe the Fusion API, which fans a single prompt across a panel of budget models, then merges the answers. OpenRouter's annualized revenue was around $50 million in March, putting the deal somewhere near 50 times revenue.