Stripe confirmed on Wednesday that it was buying OpenRouter. While the company didn’t disclose the deal price, sources told the New York Times that it paid $7.5 billion.
That’s a huge step up from OpenRouter’s $1.3 billion valuation in May. To put that price in context, the founders alone will reportedly receive $1.5 billion from the sale — more than the startup’s entire valuation just three months ago. Investors will get the remaining $6 billion, according to the NYT. Stripe reportedly had to outbid others interested in the fast-growing startup, including Databricks.
But the question is: what does a payments giant want with a startup that routes prompts between different AI models?
The short and funny answer, according to a leaked letter from Stripe’s founders to its investors about the deal, is: the singularity.
“It’s a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term but we decided that January 1 marked the beginning of the singularity and we’ve been operating on that basis,” they wrote in the letter, published by Eric Newcomer, and verified by TechCrunch.
