OpenSea founder takes action again: OpenRouter sells for a valuation of 10 billion to Stripe

Author: Nancy, PANews

More than four years ago, Alex Atallah exited before the peak of the NFT bubble; now, he is once again in the spotlight amid the AI boom and is preparing to sell the AI model aggregation platform he founded, OpenRouter, at a high price.

On July 23, according to The Wall Street Journal, payment giant Stripe is in talks to acquire OpenRouter, with a potential deal valuation close to $10 billion. If the deal goes through, it will mark Alex Atallah's second successful creation of a company valued at over $10 billion, following the NFT platform OpenSea.

Stripe Plans to Acquire OpenRouter, Valuation Could Hit $10 Billion

Rumors of OpenRouter's "sale" have been brewing for some time.

Last week, multiple foreign media outlets, including The Information and Jawl, reported that OpenRouter had received acquisition interest from several large tech companies and had begun discussions regarding the sale, with potential transaction sizes reaching billions of dollars.

According to the latest news from The Wall Street Journal, Stripe is considering acquiring the world's largest AI model aggregation platform. Insiders revealed that the deal negotiations could be announced soon, but there are still uncertainties, including the possibility of negotiations breaking down or other potential buyers entering the bidding.

Interestingly, Alex Atallah has described OpenRouter as the "Stripe of the AI field." In his view, just as Stripe helps customers handle various payments through a unified entry point, OpenRouter aims to be a unified entry point for businesses to access different AI models, reducing the costs of switching between multiple AI providers while avoiding being "locked in" by a single model supplier.

In fact, OpenRouter has already established a partnership with Stripe. This potential deal is also seen as an important move for the payment infrastructure giant to further extend into the AI infrastructure sector. It is worth noting that this could be another significant acquisition move for Stripe, following recent market rumors about its plans to acquire PayPal.

Currently, neither party has disclosed the specific transaction amount. However, insiders have indicated that if the deal is finalized, the valuation of OpenRouter at the time of sale could approach $10 billion.

This figure would far exceed OpenRouter's previous valuation during its financing rounds. Founded just over three years ago, this AI infrastructure company has achieved rapid growth driven by the wave of large models.

Public data shows that OpenRouter has completed three rounds of financing, raising over $150 million in total. In June 2025, OpenRouter announced the completion of a $40 million seed round and Series A financing, with a post-money valuation of approximately $547 million; on March 26, 2026, OpenRouter announced the completion of a $113 million Series B financing, with a post-money valuation of approximately $1.3 billion.

If this deal ultimately goes through, it would mean that OpenRouter's valuation could achieve nearly tenfold growth within a few months, entering the $10 billion unicorn club.

The soaring valuation of OpenRouter is not only due to the explosive demand brought about by the rapid expansion of large models but also benefits from increased attention from the capital market towards the AI infrastructure sector.

Replaying the OpenSea Exit Script? Why Did OpenRouter Choose to "Sell"?

This is not the first time Alex Atallah has built a company valued at over $10 billion.

Prior to this, the serial entrepreneur co-founded OpenSea, bringing NFTs from niche circles into the public eye. During the height of the NFT craze, OpenSea grew from an obscure platform to the world's largest NFT marketplace, with a valuation exceeding $13 billion at one point, and the two founders' net worth reaching approximately $2.2 billion.

However, before the NFT market experienced a significant downturn in 2022, Alex Atallah chose to leave OpenSea. Subsequently, as the industry bubble deflated, OpenSea's valuation plummeted, and the former NFT leader gradually lost its peak luster. Alex Atallah's early exit was also seen by the market as an important signal of a peak.

Afterward, Alex Atallah turned his attention to AI infrastructure, and the OpenRouter he founded became the largest transit hub of the AI era.

Currently, OpenRouter has integrated over 400 AI models, has approximately 10 million users, and processes over 200 trillion tokens monthly. This year, the number of tokens processed through its API has grown about tenfold.

However, it is noteworthy that despite the rapid growth of its business, OpenRouter has not chosen to go public but is instead pursuing a potential sale. The reason is that this is a massive-scale business with limited profit margins.

Currently, OpenRouter primarily profits by charging a platform service fee when developers call AI models, with a commission rate of about 5%-5.5%. Although its annual AI inference consumption has reached hundreds of millions of dollars, as of April 2026, the company's annualized revenue was about $50 million.

In other words, OpenRouter connects a vast AI demand market but does not fully control the upstream of the value chain. As model capabilities gradually standardize, the platform is susceptible to the rise of open-source models, binding by cloud vendor ecosystems, and direct price reductions by model suppliers, which may continue to pressure profit margins. OpenRouter finds it challenging to tell a story of exponential growth and super high profits in the capital market.

At the same time, competition in the AI model aggregation sector is intensifying. For example, Meta's internal AI incubator is developing a scheduling service to compete with OpenRouter to reduce code development computing costs; domestically, platforms like Cheetah Mobile's EasyRouter and NetEase Youdao's ThinkFlow have also emerged.

Therefore, the high valuation currently given to OpenRouter by the market is more about pricing its future potential rather than its current profitability.

However, for potential buyers, the truly attractive asset of OpenRouter may not be its current revenue scale but rather the real AI usage data it has accumulated over the long term.

By connecting hundreds of models and tens of millions of users, OpenRouter has accumulated a wealth of call data from real production environments, including performance differences of different models in actual tasks, developer preferences, price sensitivity, and the substitution relationship between open-source and closed-source models. Compared to laboratory test data, this real-world AI usage data is closer to market demand and is harder to replicate quickly through short-term investments. This may also be a significant reason why large tech companies are willing to pay a premium for OpenRouter.

From NFTs to AI, Alex Atallah has twice hit the zeitgeist. If OpenRouter ultimately sells for a $10 billion valuation, does it signify a repricing of AI infrastructure value or another signal of a cycle peak? The answer may still require time to verify.