Stripe in Talks to Buy AI Model Marketplace OpenRouter for About $10 Billion

Stripe is in talks to acquire OpenRouter, according to people familiar with the matter cited Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, some of whom said the business could fetch about $10 billion in a sale. The exact price under discussion could not be learned. A transaction could be announced soon, the report stated, but the talks could end without a deal or another suitor could emerge.

OpenRouter lets businesses and developers access hundreds of large language models through one platform, including systems built by OpenAI and Anthropic and open-weight alternatives. Customers can compare and switch among the models. In its May Series B announcement, OpenRouter disclosed that its customers were sending 25 trillion tokens through the service each week.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Alex Atallah previously co-founded the NFT marketplace OpenSea and served as its chief technology officer. In a May interview with The New York Times, Atallah described OpenRouter as the AI equivalent of Stripe, which handles transactions for customers through one access point. That description came two months before the reported approach from the payments company. A sale around $10 billion would imply a price roughly seven to eight times the $1.3 billion post-money valuation set in May.

OpenRouter's 25 trillion tokens a week

Weekly volume stood at 25 trillion tokens, up from 5 trillion six months earlier, according to OpenRouter's financing materials. The company forecast more than a quadrillion tokens for 2026 and expected to serve more than 8 million developers building across more than 400 models. It raised $113 million in the round, led by CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund. NVentures, Nvidia's venture arm, participated with four other corporate venture firms, while Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures joined as existing investors. Atallah said in the materials, "Running inference at scale is fundamentally a multi-model problem. The era of picking a single model is over."

Third-party equity researcher Sacra estimates OpenRouter had reached about $50 million in annualized revenue in March, up from roughly $19 million at the end of 2025. Its profile lists the company's take rate near 5% on top of customer inference spend. At a potential $10 billion sale price, OpenRouter would be valued at about 200 times Sacra's annualized revenue estimate. Atallah declined to disclose revenue figures when the Series B was announced.

The $1.3 billion May valuation

PitchBook recorded OpenRouter's post-money valuation at $1.3 billion after the round, according to TechCrunch. That was more than double the roughly $547 million post-money mark reached after its June 2025 Series A.

Six days before the Journal's July 23 report, The Information reported that OpenRouter had fielded takeover interest from larger technology companies at prices above the $1.3 billion valuation. People cited in the July 23 report added that other large firms in the sector had considered potential deals.

Stripe's OpenRouter partnership

The two companies already work together. OpenRouter uses Stripe to accept customer payments under their existing partnership.

The July 23 report said Stripe's valuation had reached $159 billion earlier this year and described the payments processor's expansion into AI infrastructure and stablecoin payments. It stated that an OpenRouter purchase could extend Stripe into a growing area of AI as companies use multiple systems to manage spending and reduce reliance on OpenAI and Anthropic; Microsoft, for example, added Anthropic to Office without dropping OpenAI.

Stripe's $53 billion PayPal offer

The same July 23 report covered both the OpenRouter talks and a separate PayPal approach, with Stripe pursuing more than one large acquisition at once. Stripe and Advent International recently made an unsolicited offer that would value PayPal at roughly $53 billion, according to people familiar with that matter. PayPal considered the proposed price too low. Stripe and the private-equity firm were still weighing their next move, the people said.

Neither Stripe nor OpenRouter has confirmed a transaction.

Nebius Buys Eigen AI for $643 Million to Strengthen Token Factory

Nebius agreed Friday to acquire Eigen AI, a California inference-optimization startup, for about $643 million in cash and stock. The deal would fold Eigen's serving, system and kernel work into Nebius

The Implicator

OpenAI Quietly Bought Voice-Cloning Startup Weights.gg, Then Folded the Team

OpenAI's purchase of Weights.gg, the voice-cloning startup whose Replay catalog hosted models for Taylor Swift, Samuel L. Jackson, President Trump and dozens of other named figures, looks less like an

The Implicator

Allbirds Stock Soared on Its AI Pivot. The New Backers Are Still Unknown.

Allbirds, the struggling shoe company once valued at more than $4 billion, is selling its footwear brand and said Wednesday it plans to turn the remaining public company into an AI compute infrastruct

The Implicator

Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai