Stripe Acquires AI Model Router OpenRouter for Over $7 Billion

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Payments giant Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter, an AI model routing platform, for more than $7 billion, Bloomberg reported on August 16. Founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah, OpenRouter provides a single API giving developers access to over 400 AI models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, charging a 5% fee on inference spend. The acquisition price represents more than five times OpenRouter's $1.3 billion Series B valuation, which was set just 82 days earlier in late May 2026. Stripe and OpenRouter had already been working closely together since January 2026, when OpenRouter adopted Stripe's invoicing, tax, and fraud tools to manage its global billing. Analysts see the deal as a logical extension of Stripe's core expertise in routing high-volume, latency-sensitive transactions across multiple providers — a structure closely mirrored by AI inference routing.

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