Aug 19 (Reuters) - Payments firm Stripe said on Wednesday it has agreed to buy OpenRouter, which helps businesses route and optimize token usage, at an undisclosed value, its latest bet on the fast-growing AI industry.
The deal comes as soaring bills drive companies toward cheaper models and routing tools like OpenRouter, and deepens a year-long push by the fintech into AI. The push has included launching products like token billing to track AI model consumption.
AI marketplace platforms like OpenRouter
allow developers to send queries to dozens of AI models through a single interface, making them a popular testing ground for new systems.
"Tokens are the central currency for companies building with AI, and it's clear that the real-world economic potential will depend on making good use of scarce compute resources," Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said.
Bloomberg News reported earlier this month that Stripe had agreed to buy OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, citing people familiar with the matter.
Stripe declined to comment on the purchase price, while OpenRouter did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment.
OpenRouter, which was founded in 2023, processes more than 10 trillion tokens per day from more than 400 AI models for a community of over 10 million developers and companies.
A Deloitte report in March found that most surveyed companies with annual revenue of at least $500 million expect to consume more than 10 billion tokens per month by 2028.
OpenRouter has raised capital from heavyweights such as Menlo Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. In May, the firm raised $113 million in a funding round led by Alphabet’s independent growth fund CapitalG.
Stripe, which was valued at $159 billion in a tender offer earlier this year, has made a joint offer with private equity firm Advent International to buy PayPal for more than $53 billion, Reuters reported last month.
Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume last year, a 34% jump from 2024.
(Reporting by Arasu Kannagi Basil and Prakhar Srivastava in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)
