Stripe wants a foothold in AI, and it is willing to pay dearly for it. The payments company is in talks to buy OpenRouter for about $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported. That is a staggering price for a startup valued at just $1.3 billion in May. The talks are preliminary, and could still fall apart or draw a rival bidder.
OpenRouter is a marketplace for AI models. Founded in New York in 2023, it lets developers reach more than 400 large language models from around 70 providers through one interface. It routes each request to the cheapest or best option. Its co-founder Alex Atallah, who previously built the NFT marketplace OpenSea, calls it “an AI equivalent of Stripe”.
That pitch is the whole story. As AI bills climb, companies want to spread their work across many models rather than lock in with one lab. OpenRouter sits in the middle. It is the toll booth between the labs that build the models and the businesses that use them. Those can be open models, or closed ones from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Stripe, valued at $159 billion, wants to own that toll booth as it pushes beyond payments into AI infrastructure. The two already work together, as OpenRouter uses Stripe to bill its own customers.
