Stripe confirmed on Wednesday that it was buying OpenRouter. Although the company did not disclose the price of the transaction, sources told the New York Times that it paid $7.5 billion. That represents a considerable increase from OpenRouter's valuation of $1.3 billion in May. The founders of the startup will reportedly receive $1.5 billion from the sale, more than the company's entire valuation just three months ago. According to the NYT, investors will receive the remaining $6 billion.
Stripe reportedly had to outbid other companies interested in the fast-growing startup, including Databricks. But the question arises: what does a payments giant want with a startup that routes requests between different AI models?
According to a leaked letter from Stripe's founders to their investors about the transaction, the short and tongue-in-cheek answer is: the singularity. "It is a fuzzy term and perhaps already overused, but we decided that January 1 marked the beginning of the singularity and we have operated on that basis," they wrote in the letter, published by Eric Newcomer and verified by TechCrunch. The brothers Patrick and John Collison, founders of Stripe, apparently do not believe that humanity began turning into "The Borg" eight months ago.
However, the founders have pointed to the economic boost that AI is bringing to Stripe. With AI, more businesses are launching and more of them are using Stripe's offerings. The company claims that 88% of Forbes' AI 50 list uses its products, including OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as 100% of Brex's fastest-growing startups. OpenRouter will continue to operate independently after the transaction closes in a few weeks, the startup promised in its blog, saying that its "current product, mission and commitments remain unchanged".
To date, most of Stripe's major acquisitions have been related to helping people collect and manage incoming cash. Buying OpenRouter appears to be a move towards the other side of accounting: expense management, starting with AI costs. Franco Granda, research analyst at PitchBook, said that this acquisition "is Stripe's deliberate attempt to embed itself at the centre of capital flows in the AI era". The company joins an unusual set of companies that are also entering token expense management, including Databricks, Rippling and Ramp, which recently launched their own solutions.
