Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for close to 10 billion dollars AI model marketplace
Stripe is in talks to buy AI model marketplace OpenRouter for close to $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports, up sharply from OpenRouter's $1.3 billion valuation last year. OpenRouter routes over 5 million developers to hundreds of AI models and could let Stripe steer paym
Stripe is in talks to acquire OpenRouter, an AI model marketplace that gives more than 5 million developers access to hundreds of models from OpenAI, Anthropic and open-weight providers, for a price close to $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported. The figure would value OpenRouter at roughly eight times the $1.3 billion valuation it carried after its last funding round, and a deal could be announced within a month, though talks could still fall apart. OpenRouter has also held early discussions with data and AI company Databricks about a possible sale, though it is unclear where those talks stand. Stripe already has an operational relationship with OpenRouter through its payments platform, and the company has been positioning itself deeper inside AI infrastructure. It acquired usage-based billing startup Metronome earlier this year and posted free cash flow of $3.2 billion in 2025, up 52% year over year, giving it the balance sheet to fund a deal this size. For businesses that rely on AI tools, the acquisition would put a payments company in a position to influence which AI models companies actually use by default, tying model selection to billing infrastructure that already touches billions of transactions.