Stripe Swipes Its Card for a $7B AI Startup
Stripe is reportedly closing a deal to buy OpenRouter, the AI model marketplace that lets developers route requests across different LLMs, for over $7 billion. It's one of the biggest AI acquisitions of the year and a sign that even payments giants want a piece of the AI infrastructure gold rush, not just the checkout button. OpenRouter has quietly become plumbing for thousands of AI apps, and Stripe clearly wants to own more of that stack before someone else does.
Nothing says 'we're definitely not just a payments company anymore' like a $7 billion AI shopping spree.