20VC: Will OpenRouter Sell for $10BN to Stripe? | Why Chinese Open Models Are Beating America—and What Happens Next | Why Enterprises Are More Fearful of Anthropic and OpenAI Than China | Is the Routing Layer Becoming a Commodity with Alex Atallah

**Alex Atallah** (0:00)
This is gonna be like the biggest, biggest market in tech ever. A lot of companies are making routers because it's fashionable. The model apps have several incentives to go after you eventually. In July, we launched 70 models, about one model every 10 hours. America is very, very behind still, but GLM 5.2 was a really big, big step for open weight models.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:25)
There are reports that you are selling to Stripe for $10 billion.
Is that going to happen? This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, the only thing that I really care about anymore is providing the best, most relevant interviews at the right time to you. So today we have Alex Atallah, co-founder and CEO of OpenRouter, the gateway to the world of LLMs. They reportedly have had offers from Stripe for $10 billion. They've raised at a valuation of over a billion and a half. They are the market leader. And this interview could not come at a more prescient time. It will be very interesting to see whether the company chooses to stay private or sell to Stripe. We shall see. But this interview was recorded before, so we will check back in a couple of weeks. This was an incredible show and it was awesome to have Alex in the studio. But before we dive into the show today, founders face a different set of challenges at every stage of growth. For Sid Shait, co-founder and CEO of D-Matrix, JP Morgan delivered the guidance and expertise to help navigate what came next. He credits JP Morgan's high touch approach with supporting D-Matrix as it grew and expanded internationally. Whether you're in the early days or expanding into new markets, JP Morgan helps startups navigate complexity with real confidence, offering personalized guidance and deep sector expertise. Find out how JP Morgan helps founders at jpmorgan.com/growwithoutlimits.
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**Alex Atallah** (3:36)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:39)
Alex, I am so excited for this, dude. I have wanted to make this one happen for a while. I've heard so many things from Matt at Manlo. I've stalked the shit out of you speaking to Anjani, even your roommate before this show. So thank you for joining me, dude.

**Alex Atallah** (3:52)
Thank you. It's great to be here.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:54)
Now, I want to start with a little bit pre-OpenRouter and start on OpenSea. It was a pretty incredible journey. What did you take with you to OpenRouter, having seen all that you saw with OpenSea?

**Alex Atallah** (4:07)
Yeah. So OpenSea starts the first NFT marketplace. Similar to OpenRouter, it was very small for a long time. We kept the team very small until the Series A roughly, a little bit afterwards, and this was before AI.
Right after NFTs started blowing up in October of 2020, we were like, oh my goodness, we are understaffed. The servers are melting. Our search index was exploding. We had a couple big outages. It was tough to keep the site up, and it was like, oh my god, we're going to become the Twitter fail whale, but applied to crypto. My biggest goal was to have us not be the Twitter fail whale for crypto.
And it took a little bit to create the team, get platform and infrastructure under control, make sure we could predictably scale. In other words, do load testing to help the site sustain 10x load, even when we weren't seeing that load. Because with crypto, you just don't know. There were these moments where we would get these incredible traffic spikes, and it would be very dependent on the content and the community. So I built a lot of infrastructure and scaling responsibilities then that I took to OpenRouter and spent a lot of time thinking about, how do we make something that is going to basically be always up, and that people can really count on from an infrastructure point of view, even when there are huge surges in tumultuous markets. Which has been very helpful for AI, of course, because all companies, especially Anthropic, have seen unpredictable growth, and we have as well. And we've had a couple bumps, but overall, it's been significantly better. And OpenSea just kind of like drilled that into me in a way where I could take it productively to OpenRouter.