The valuation skyrocketed from 1.3 billion to 10 billion dollars in 2 months! The largest AI hub OpenRouter is about to be acquired

Author: Xinzhi Yuan

Stripe is negotiating to acquire OpenRouter

According to reports from The Wall Street Journal and The Information citing informed sources, the transaction price could be close to $10 billion (approximately 68 billion RMB).

• https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/stripe-in-talks-to-buy-buzzy-ai-model-marketplace-openrouter-decc6a74

• https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/stripe-talks-buy-startup-openrouter

Two months ago, OpenRouter was valued at only $1.3 billion (approximately 8.8 billion RMB), a premium of nearly 7 times.

The deal could be announced within a month, but it may also fall through.

According to The Information, Databricks had previously also discussed acquiring OpenRouter, but further developments are unclear.

A Stripe spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal, "We do not comment on rumors and speculation."

Most people may not have heard of OpenRouter, but what it does is relevant to every AI user.

The AI application you use has a price comparison engine behind it

Open an AI translation tool, input a sentence, and receive results in seconds.

What you don't see is: whether this sentence was sent to GPT, Claude, or some much cheaper open-source model.

The decision of "which model to choose" is increasingly made by intermediaries like OpenRouter.

A simple analogy: if AI models are flights, OpenRouter is the travel booking site.

Developers connect to over 400 large models through its API, automatically matching based on task complexity, cost, and response speed.

Summarizing a routine email does not require the most expensive cutting-edge model, while processing a legal contract would be directed to a more capable one.

The user experience remains unchanged, but the billing behind it differs by several times.

This also explains why many AI products can maintain low prices or even be free.

OpenRouter was founded by Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy in 2023.

Alex Atallah

Louis Vichy

Atallah's previous venture was the NFT trading platform OpenSea, which peaked at a valuation of $13.3 billion.

After the NFT market declined, he left in 2022 to focus on AI infrastructure.

He mentioned in an interview:

Inference is the fastest-growing cost for businesses, often coming from more than four different models.

Growth data validates this judgment.

According to The Information, as of April this year, OpenRouter's annualized revenue reached $50 million, increasing fivefold in six months.

The platform has over 400 large models listed, with over 1 million developer users.

Investors include CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund), Menlo Ventures, and a16z, with a total funding of $153 million.

Stripe aims to be the cash register and scheduling center of the AI economy

Stripe is the world's largest internet payment processor, helping millions of businesses complete online payments.

In the past year, the company has intensively extended its business into AI infrastructure.

In December 2025, Stripe spent about $1 billion to acquire the usage-based billing platform Metronome.

Metronome helps AI companies charge customers based on token usage, with OpenAI and Anthropic as its clients.

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison stated at the time:

Usage-based pricing is the native business model of the AI era.

With OpenRouter, Stripe's intentions become clear: selecting models, billing, and payment, all integrated into one chain.

If AI applications are likened to restaurants, Stripe simultaneously becomes the ingredient coordinator (helping you choose models), the utility meter (billing by usage), and the cash register (payment).

For enterprise clients, one vendor can manage all AI usage and billing.

Stripe has the ammunition to do this.

According to The Information, Stripe's free cash flow in 2025 is projected to be $3.2 billion, a 52% year-over-year increase, with annual revenue around $6.8 billion.

In February of this year, an employee stock transfer pushed the valuation to $159 billion.

During the same period, Stripe also partnered with private equity firm Advent International to make an acquisition offer of about $53 billion to PayPal, which deemed the price too low, and negotiations are ongoing.

Spending $10 billion to buy a company with annual revenue of $50 million seems exorbitant.

However, OpenRouter's revenue has increased fivefold in six months, betting on growth rate.

More critically, it's about positioning: as companies shift from being tied to a single AI model to using multiple models, those controlling the routing layer gain the power to allocate traffic.

Which model is prioritized and which is deprioritized is determined at this layer.

For ordinary users, changes may not be immediate, but the direction is already visible.

By acquiring Metronome, Stripe secured "how to charge," and by acquiring OpenRouter, it secured "whose model to use." Combining these two questions forms the entry point for AI applications.

Every AI product you will use in the future, its cost and the underlying model choices, are shifting from application developers down to the infrastructure layer.

References:

• https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/stripe-in-talks-to-buy-buzzy-ai-model-marketplace-openrouter-decc6a74

• https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/stripe-talks-buy-startup-openrouter

• https://www.theinformation.com/articles/needs-openrouter