Bloomberg says Stripe is buying OpenRouter for over 7B USD

Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter for more than 7B USD, TechCrunch writes, citing Bloomberg. Stripe declined to comment to TechCrunch, and the companies have not framed it as an official announcement yet.

OpenRouter is an AI model gateway: developers use it as one access point for different models, choosing between providers by cost, speed and capability instead of wiring every model directly. The company said during its recent funding round that it had 8 million users and access to more than 400 models.

That makes the deal more important than a normal startup acquisition. Stripe already became infrastructure for internet payments; OpenRouter is trying to play a similar routing role for AI inference. If Stripe owns that layer, it gets a position between developers, model labs and usage-based AI spending.

The reported price is also a signal. OpenRouter was valued around 1.3B USD in its Series B, according to TechCrunch, and earlier reporting from The Wall Street Journal said Stripe and OpenRouter were in talks. A price above 7B USD would show how aggressively large platforms are buying their way into AI infrastructure, not just building apps on top of models.