Stripe Finalizes $7 Billion Deal for AI Firm OpenRouter

Stripe has reportedly finalized its bid to acquire OpenRouter, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup.

The payments processor will pay more than $7 billion for the purchase, Bloomberg News reported Sunday (Aug. 16), citing sources familiar with the matter.

The report notes that the deal comes just months after OpenRouter raised money at a reported $1.3 billion valuation, and spotlights the demand among businesses to uncover the most cost-friendly AI solutions. The deal could also give Stripe a stronger presence in the AI space, the Bloomberg report added.

A spokeperson for Stripe told PYMNTS the company does not comment on “rumors or speculation.”

News that Stripe wanted to acquire OpenRouter broke last month, though initial reporters placed the company’s offer at around $10 billion.

Founded in 2023, OpenRouter “does not build AI models” but rather “decides which one should answer each request,” PYMNTS wrote in July.

“The platform gives developers a single connection point. From there, they can reach more than 400 AI models from over 60 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and DeepSeek,” that report continued. “As a result, a company can switch AI models without rebuilding its software each time.”

Stripe has already made another AI-related purchase this year, finalizing its acquisition of Metronome in January.

“Metronome and OpenRouter solve two different parts of the same problem, in a specific order. Metronome answers how much the request costs, and how it should be billed,” the report said.

“These questions, though, only come up after the request has already gone to a specific AI model. OpenRouter, meanwhile, answers an earlier question: Which model should handle the request in the first place? That decision comes down to price, speed and quality. In short, one system measures what already happened. The other decides what happens next.”

Meanwhile, Stripe is also reportedly part of a group interested in acquiring PayPal, as covered here last week. The two sides had begun talks in July, with Stripe and Advent International proposing a price that PayPal eventually decided was not sufficient.

When PayPal announced in January that it ousted CEO Alex Chriss and named HP’s Enrique Lores as his replacement, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote that the move was not a surprise because PayPal’s market cap had been where it was a decade earlier when the company broke off from eBay.

“The big question now is why Lores and why now,” Webster wrote. “A look at his resume might hold some clues. He led the separation of HP into two business units in 2014. Could that be PayPal’s next move?”