Stripe has finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, Bloomberg reported Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. A Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch the company does not comment on "rumors or speculation."
OpenRouter runs a marketplace that lets developers pick among more than 400 AI models depending on task, cost and performance, without locking into a single provider, according to Yahoo Finance. The startup says it has 8 million users worldwide.
The price values OpenRouter at more than five times the $1.3 billion valuation it set in May, when it raised $113 million in a Series B round from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures and Google's CapitalG, Yahoo Finance reported. The Wall Street Journal first reported the two companies were in talks last month, according to TechCrunch.
OpenRouter's chief executive has compared the startup's role to Stripe's own, both acting as a single gateway that abstracts away many underlying systems, Yahoo Finance reported. Neither company has officially confirmed the deal or disclosed a closing date.
For builders, this is the second AI infrastructure company folded into a bigger balance sheet this week, after SpaceX closed its purchase of Cursor. If Stripe ends up owning the routing layer millions of developers use to pick models, pricing and neutrality on that layer become Stripe's call, not an independent startup's.