Author: Chen Junda

Today, according to The Wall Street Journal, American financial technology company Stripe is in talks to acquire the top large model transit station OpenRouter. The specific price of the deal remains unclear, but some insiders say the valuation could reach around 10 billion USD (approximately 67.755 billion RMB).

Insiders added that several large technology companies are also considering acquiring OpenRouter. The deal between Stripe and OpenRouter could be announced soon, but negotiations may still fall apart, and other bidders may emerge.

OpenRouter was founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy and is headquartered in San Francisco, USA. The company’s CEO Alex Atallah founded the world's largest NFT platform OpenSea and exited before the bubble burst to switch to the AI sector.

OpenRouter belongs to an emerging track in the AI infrastructure field—a large model transit station, essentially functioning as a model router or model aggregation platform.

▲OpenRouter Official Website

Specifically, OpenRouter’s platform connects over 400 large language models, including closed-source commercial models like OpenAI's GPT series and Anthropic's Claude series, as well as open-source models like DeepSeek and Kimi. Developers and businesses can use a single set of API interfaces from OpenRouter to simultaneously call, compare, and switch among different vendors’ AI models without having to interface separately with each vendor.

The commercial value of this model lies in two points: First, it helps companies compare options and automatically select the most cost-effective model for different task scenarios; second, it provides failover capability, automatically switching to backup services when a model service goes down or is rate-limited, ensuring business continuity. For small and medium-sized developers who do not wish to be bound to a single AI giant and lack the capability to build their own model routing, this acts as an added layer of insurance.

OpenRouter’s business model is also straightforward, charging service fees to enterprise customers using its platform or profiting from the price difference in model services during the credit recharge process.

In May this year, OpenRouter was valued at 1.3 billion USD in its latest round of financing, with investors including Menlo Ventures and CapitalG, the growth fund of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Notably, OpenRouter has previously collaborated with Stripe, with the former using Stripe to process customer payments.

The acquisition of OpenRouter by Stripe might seem like a cross-industry move, but it is actually in line with its recent strategic expansion into the AI infrastructure field. This payment company has long been linked to the AI industry; as early as 2023, OpenAI chose Stripe to handle subscription payments for ChatGPT Plus; now, all the companies on the Forbes AI 50 list that integrated online payments run on Stripe, including Anthropic, Midjourney, and Cohere as clients.

At the Stripe Sessions conference in April this year, Stripe launched 288 products at once, almost all focused on building the economic infrastructure for AI, including Link Wallet accessible to agents, streaming payments with real-time settlement by token, and the MPP protocol for machine-to-machine micropayments. Its co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison believes that in the future, smart agents will dominate the majority of online transactions.

▲Stripe's payment services for AI scenarios

In addition to its ongoing developments in the AI sector, Stripe is also partnering with private equity firm Advent International to push for the acquisition of PayPal, with their recent unilateral acquisition offer valuing PayPal at about 53 billion USD. However, this offer is regarded as too low, and Stripe and Advent are considering their next steps.

Conclusion: The multi-model strategy gives rise to the value of the "routing layer"

Currently, more and more companies are inclined to adopt a multi-model strategy, not betting all on a single provider like OpenAI or Anthropic, but flexibly allocating different models based on cost, performance, and reliability.

OpenRouter exactly provides such services, which is also one of the important reasons for its continually increasing valuation in transactions. As model capabilities converge, companies that can efficiently connect demand and supply are also demonstrating significant value in the AI industry chain.