Stripe’s OpenRouter Bid 70 Times Company’s Annual Revenue

Last week saw reports that Stripe is considering buying artificial intelligence startup OpenRouter for $10 billion.

If the deal goes through at that amount, Stripe would be paying roughly 70 times OpenRouter’s annualized revenue, The Information reported Wednesday (July 29), citing an unnamed source.

OpenRouter is generating roughly $140 million in annualized revenue, a three-fold increase since April, the report said. Costs have been low for the startup, which helps app developers access hundreds of AI models.

However, the price Stripe floated is high compared to other AI acquisitions when calculated as a multiple of forward revenue, according to the report.

When SpaceX spent $60 billion to acquire AI coding app Cursor, for example, the latter company was generating $2.7 billion in annualized revenue in March, meaning SpaceX was paying around 22 times Cursor’s forward revenue, the report said.

Although OpenRouter is smaller than Cursor, it “likely has better economics,” as its costs for serving its model-routing product were 28.5% of its revenue, meaning it was bringing in $100 million in annualized gross profit, according to the report.

“With a roughly 70% gross profit margin, OpenRouter was near the level of high-performing, publicly traded software firms in that regard,” the report said.

Stripe’s bid for OpenRouter placed it among a larger group of companies trying to “build, buy or open their own version of AI model routing,” with Cursor, Meta and Ramp all embarking on similar efforts the same week, PYMNTS reported Monday (July 27).

“For a payments company like Stripe, the routing layer is valuable for a reason that has little to do with AI cost savings,” the report said. “It sits one step upstream of a problem FinTech companies already spend heavily trying to solve: billing AI usage accurately.”

Unpredictable AI pricing is the chief barrier to adoption for 46% of IT leaders, according to the report, which cited Stripe’s research. AI infrastructure costs have risen from around 10% of a typical AI company’s budget to as much as 35% to 40% as usage scales, per industry analysis from billing platform Flexprice.

“Long before an invoice gets generated, something has already decided which model answers a request and what it will cost,” the report said. “Whoever owns that decision owns the first move in every transaction that follows. A simple question still doesn’t cost the same to answer as a hard one, and increasingly, neither does owning the software that decides which is which.”