Stripe Adds Online Legal Services Firm Clerky to Its Fold

Online legal services company Clerky says it is now part of payments giant Stripe.

The company announced the deal last week, though terms have not been disclosed. Launched more than a decade ago, Clerky provides startups and their lawyers with tools to automate legal paperwork for things like hiring, fundraising or incorporation.

“As startup attorneys in Silicon Valley, we saw how our clients would try to get paperwork done faster and cheaper, but ended up paying us more in the end to fix everything,” the company wrote on its blog. “We started Clerky to provide the experience our clients were looking for, but with our legal expertise built into the products.”

Clerky says it is now the most popular online legal service for “top startups” and their attorneys, with the company’s startup clients making up “23% of all Silicon Valley seed / pre-seed financings” and raising more than $140 billion in aggregate venture capital. In the last year, startup formation on Clerky grew 6.5 times faster than its historical average, the blog post said.

“Along the way, we’ve gotten to know many platforms in the startup ecosystem, including Stripe,” the company added. “The more we got to know the team at Stripe, the more we found similarities, not only between our culture and beliefs, but also in our shared mission to help the startup ecosystem.”

In other Stripe news, PYMNTS wrote last month about the company’s plans to acquire OpenRouter, a startup that provides developers with a single gateway to hundreds of artificial intelligence (AI) models and can route requests according to factors such as model capabilities, cost and the task in question.

News reports before the deal was finalized noted that Stripe might be paying more than OpenRouter’s valuation to acquire the company. Terms of the deal were not ultimately disclosed, but a New York Times report put the value of the purchase at $7.5 billion, while OpenRouter was valued at $1.3 billion in May.

“The more interesting question for businesses is not why Stripe wants an AI gateway,” PYMNTS wrote. “It is why an AI gateway might belong next to payments infrastructure. The answer points toward a financial management problem that is only beginning to reach the chief financial officer. AI is turning computing from something companies largely procure into something software can buy for itself.”