tape In talks to buy OpenRoutera startup company in the field of artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal said the deal could value the company at about $10 billion I mentioned. The agreement may be announced soon. However, talks may fail, or another buyer may step in. The exact price has not been confirmed.
OpenRouter was valued at $1.3 billion in May. This followed a $113 million funding round led by… capital gthe venture capital arm of Google. By comparison, a $10 billion sale would value OpenRouter at about eight times that number. This jump will come in less than three months.
This jump underscores how quickly OpenRouter is growing. It also shows how important the company is to how companies deploy AI. So, understanding the potential deal starts with understanding what OpenRouter actually does.
What OpenRouter does
OpenRouter does not build AI models. Instead, it decides which one should answer each request. The platform provides developers with a single point of contact. From there, they can access more than 400 AI models from more than 60 companies, including… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, dead and Deep Sick. As a result, the company can switch AI models without rebuilding its software every time.
OpenRouter now handles an estimated 1.5 quadrillion “codes” per year. Symbols are the units that artificial intelligence systems use to process text. More than 8 million developers use the platform, according to Menlo Enterprisesone of its investors. Menlo estimates that volume equals 15% to 30% of Google’s total premium traffic. It also accounts for 20% to 40% of OpenAI’s traffic, more than half MicrosoftAzure AI Foundry service.
The OpenRouter business model has helped fuel this growth. It does not sell access to any of its AI models. They also don’t charge any more than the core AI companies already charge. So, a developer using OpenRouter pays the same price as they would by going directly to OpenAI or Anthropic, according to OpenRouter’s own Pricing documents.
Instead, OpenRouter makes money for a small fee. This fee is charged when developers add funds to their accounts. those works, Holy appreciationreached $50 million in annual revenue by March. That’s up from about $19 million at the end of 2025. It’s also growing quickly, as more companies adopt multiple AI models rather than sticking with just one.
OpenRouter and Stripe already work closely together. tape Announce In the past year, OpenRouter has used several Stripe tools. These include Bar billswhich pays the bills of its customers all over the world. It also includes Strip taxwhich calculates and collects taxes in various countries. They include Stripe’s fraud detection tool, which manages risk.
OpenRouter also uses Stripe to accept payments, including credit cards and regional payment methods such as Alipay and Google Pay. Overall, Stripe already manages a significant share of OpenRouter’s financial operations behind the scenes. This overlap makes the full acquisition process seem like a natural next step.
OpenRouter selects the model. The expediter sends the invoice.
This will be Stripe’s second AI-related purchase in less than a year. In January, bar complete that it acquisition to Accelerator. Metronome is a company built on real-time usage tracking. Think of things like an API call, a chunk of compute time, or a set of tokens processed. It then converts that usage into an invoice immediately, rather than waiting to calculate costs later.
Metronome’s clients prior to the purchase included OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia. All three companies need to bill customers for usage that can change from second to second.
Metronome and OpenRouter solve two different parts of the same problem, in a specific order. The expediter answers how much the order will cost and how it should be invoiced. However, these questions only arise after the request has already been directed to a specific AI model. Meanwhile, OpenRouter answers an earlier question: Which model should handle the request in the first place? This decision is based on price, speed and quality. In short, one system measures what actually happened. The other decides what happens next.
For all of our PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to our daily newsletter Amnesty International newsletter.
