Stripe made its largest-ever acquisition official Wednesday, signing a deal to acquire AI developer tool OpenRouter and taking a big step into the future of enterprise software.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but The New York Times reported that Stripe paid $7.5 billion for OpenRouter, which makes a widely used tool that allows developers to more easily switch their applications to point at different AI models. OpenRouter was founded in early 2023 after the November 2022 release of ChatGPT, making it one of the biggest startup exits of the generative AI era.
"OpenRouter exists to give users every model on equal footing, provide open signals about how they’re used in the market, help developers orchestrate them together, and make them observable and manageable at scale," OpenRouter said in a blog post. "It also extends to a growing ecosystem of inference-adjacent services, including AI-native web search, context management, and more to come."
Money matters
