Stripe Reportedly Agrees to Buy AI Gateway Startup OpenRouter for More Than $7 Billion

Bloomberg reported that payments company Stripe has reached a deal to acquire OpenRouter, a startup that routes developer traffic to hundreds of AI models through a single API, for over $7 billion. The price is more than five times the $1.3 billion valuation OpenRouter carried after a funding round that closed only months earlier.

Stripe has reached an agreement to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, according to a Bloomberg report published Sunday and relayed by TechCrunch and other outlets. The transaction would give the payments company a substantial position in AI infrastructure, a market where developers are increasingly focused on controlling model spending. OpenRouter, founded in 2023 and based in New York, operates what the industry calls an AI gateway: a single API endpoint through which developers can reach more than 400 large language models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and DeepSeek. The company says it serves roughly 8 million developers and also provides fallback access when a primary model fails, helping applications route each task to a cost-appropriate option. The reported price marks a steep markup. OpenRouter closed a $113 million Series B in May at a reported $1.3 billion post-money valuation, meaning the deal values the startup at more than five times that figure only three months later. It is nonetheless below the roughly $10 billion figure the Wall Street Journal cited in July, when it first reported that the two companies were in acquisition talks. OpenRouter has raised more than $150 million in total from investors including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures and Alphabet's CapitalG. OpenRouter chief executive Alex Atallah has repeatedly described his company as the Stripe of AI, arguing that it plays a comparable role by acting as a common layer spanning many underlying systems and reducing vendor lock-in. Atallah previously co-founded the NFT marketplace OpenSea, which he left in July 2022 before launching OpenRouter within a year. Growth at OpenRouter has been driven largely by developers building agentic applications, which by design draw on infrastructure spanning multiple providers and data sources. A Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company does not comment on rumors or speculation, and OpenRouter declined to comment, according to Bloomberg, which noted the final purchase price could still change.