Overview
- Stripe is negotiating to acquire OpenRouter for roughly $10 billion, a deal reported Thursday that could be announced soon but is not finalized and could still fall apart or draw competing bidders.
- OpenRouter runs a marketplace that lists hundreds of large language models and lets developers compare, route between, and switch models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic while charging a percentage fee on model usage.
- The companies already have a commercial link: OpenRouter uses Stripe to collect customer payments, which gives Stripe an immediate commercial foothold if the deal closes.
- A sale near $10 billion would represent a steep markup from OpenRouter’s roughly $1.3 billion valuation in May 2026 and would rank among the largest AI infrastructure acquisitions this year.
- The talks come as Stripe and private equity partner Advent International weigh a separate unsolicited offer for PayPal valued near $53 billion, a parallel move that leaves Stripe balancing two major strategic options and could shape its next steps.