Stripe to buy OpenRouter as fintech expands deeper into AI

Stripe said Wednesday that it plans to acquire the startup OpenRouter, as the fintech company expands into the artificial intelligence model market.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but The New York Times, citing a person familiar with the matter, said the price tag is about $7.5 billion, with $1.5 billion allocated to OpenRouter's founders. Less than three months ago OpenRouter raised $113 million at a valuation of of about $1.3 billion.

Stripe declined to comment.

OpenRouter has become popular with developers seeking to use AI models, particularly those considered non-proprietary and available for free. Many of these so-called open-weight AI models stem from Chinese labs like DeepSeek and Z.ai, which have gained steam among developers for generally being more cost-efficient relative to proprietary AI models from U.S. companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

In a blog post about the deal, Stripe noted that it's been working with companies to "optimize their token costs and route tokens efficiently," referring to a kind of metric used to measure AI model usage. Stripe said it's difficult to manage AI costs relative to performance because of the rapid "pace at which models are released and repriced."