Payments firm Stripe said on Wednesday it had agreed to buy OpenRouter, which helps businesses route and optimize token usage, its latest bet on the fast-growing AI industry. <\/p>\n
While the companies did not disclose the value of the deal, a source familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential information, \u200ctold Reuters \u2060it was \u2060worth slightly more than $8 billion. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
AI marketplace platforms like OpenRouter allow developers to send queries to dozens of AI models through a single interface, making them \u2060a popular \u200ctesting ground for new systems.<\/p>\n
“Tokens are the central currency for companies building with AI, and it’s clear that the real-world economic potential \u2060will depend on making good use of scarce compute resources,” Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said.<\/p>\n
Stripe declined to comment on the purchase price, while OpenRouter did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A Deloitte report in March found that most \u200csurveyed companies with annual revenue of at least $500 million expect to consume more than 10 billion tokens per month by 2028.<\/p>\n
OpenRouter has raised capital from heavyweights such as \u2060Menlo Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. In May, the firm raised $113 million in a funding round led by Alphabet’s independent growth fund CapitalG.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume last year, a 34% jump from 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Payments firm Stripe said on Wednesday it had agreed to buy OpenRouter, which helps businesses route and optimize token usage, its latest bet on the fast-growing AI industry. While the companies did not disclose the value of the deal, a source familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential information, \u200ctold Reuters \u2060it was \u2060worth slightly more than $8 billion. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1030199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1030199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1030199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1030199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1030217,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1030199\/revisions\/1030217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1030199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1030199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1030199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}