Patrick Collison, CEO and co-founder of Stripe, spoke at the 2022 Italian Tech Week in Turin, Italy.
Giuliano Berti | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Stripe announced Wednesday that it plans to acquire startup OpenRouter as the fintech company expands into the artificial intelligence modeling market.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but The New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter, said the deal would be worth about $7.5 billion, of which $1.5 billion would go to OpenRouter’s founders. Less than three months ago, OpenRouter raised $113 million at a valuation of approximately $1.3 billion.
Stripe declined to comment.
OpenRouter has become popular among developers looking to use AI models, especially those that are considered non-proprietary and freely available. Many of these so-called open-weight AI models originate from Chinese labs such as DeepSeek and Z.ai, and have a reputation among developers for being generally more cost-effective compared to proprietary AI models developed by U.S. companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
In a blog post about the deal, Stripe mentioned a type of metric used to measure usage of its AI models and said it was working with companies to “optimize token costs and route tokens efficiently.” Stripe said AI costs are difficult to manage compared to performance due to the “fast pace of model releases and price changes.”
Stripe has become one of the world’s most valuable startups, with a valuation of nearly $160 billion as of the beginning of this year, thanks to its online payment technology that has become popular in many markets. Last year, the company acquired stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1 billion, increasing its exposure to cryptocurrencies.
The AI market is much larger and growing much faster.
“Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI, and we look forward to working with OpenRouter to help businesses maximize profitability by intelligently routing requests and efficiently using tokens,” Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said in a statement.
OpenRouter said in a blog post that the combination with Stripe will help with its overall vision of “a healthy AI ecosystem where many models thrive, AI’s neurodiversity is a strength, breakthrough labs and inference providers can reach millions of developers, and no single model inertia becomes the default.”
Attention: According to the Wall Street Journal, Stripe and Advent are in talks to acquire PayPal.
