Stripe wants to own the toll booth between AI models, for ~$10bn
Stripe wants a foothold in AI, and it is willing to pay dearly for it. The payments company is in talks to buy OpenRouter for about $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported. That is a staggering price for a startup valued at just $1.3 billion in May. The talks are preliminary, and could still fall apart or draw a rival bidder.
OpenRouter is a marketplace for AI models. Founded in New York in 2023, it lets developers reach more than 400 large language models from around 70 providers through one interface. It routes each request to the cheapest or best option. Its co-founder Alex Atallah, who previously built the NFT marketplace OpenSea, calls it “an AI equivalent of Stripe”.
That pitch is the whole story. As AI bills climb, companies want to spread their work across many models rather than lock in with one lab. OpenRouter sits in...
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