Stripe Buys A.I. Start-Up OpenRouter for $7.5 Billion

In May, Alex Atallah, a founder of a fast-growing start-up called OpenRouter, described his company as the artificial intelligence version of the payments company Stripe.

Now Stripe is buying OpenRouter.

The deal, announced on Wednesday, combines Stripe’s technology, which lets companies direct payments to other businesses, with OpenRouter’s technology, which lets them direct their spending of “tokens” between different providers of A.I. models. Tokens are an atomic unit of A.I. use, roughly equivalent to a word fragment.

Stripe is paying $7.5 billion for OpenRouter, a person with knowledge of the agreement said. Of that sum, $1.5 billion is going to the start-up’s founders and $6 billion to investors, the person said. The companies declined to disclose the value of the deal.

OpenRouter had raised $164 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Nvidia and the investment arm of Alphabet, according to PitchBook, which tracks funding. In May, investors had valued the company at $1.3 billion.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/19/business/stripe-openrouter-ai.html