The $7 Billion AI Middle Man: Stripe Buys OpenRouter

**Josh** (0:00)
Just three months ago, investors valued OpenRouter at $1.3 billion.
And this weekend, Stripe agreed to buy it for more than $7 billion. That's a five times markup in just 90 days for a company doing roughly $140 million in revenue. That's 50 times their revenue, which is outrageous when you look at what other companies in this industry are trading at. It seems like a top signal until you realize that Stripe processed $1.9 trillion of volume last year and only kept 0.36% of it. OpenRouter charges 5.5% on everything that flows through it. So Stripe just bought this take rate of 15 times higher than what it's used to in the fastest growing industry on Earth. And this would seem like a one-off pattern if we didn't also get information from SpaceX, also known as Cursor, who just launched a GitHub competitor yesterday, while the GitHub platform was down. In AI, the attention is kind of moving from the model layer to the middle, man, and we have some proof that we're going to walk through today going through this OpenRouter acquisition and the SpaceX alternative to GitHub. So pretty big deals.

**Ejaaz** (0:57)
So the number one question, I think, if you're listening to this episode is, why on earth should I care? And why do I care about some TradFi Stripe finance company buying this other random company that I don't really care about, right? I only want to hear about Anthropic, I only want to hear about OpenAI. Well, firstly, what is OpenRouter? OpenRouter is basically a platform that you can go to and you pay one subscription, you pay once, and you get access to 400 plus AI models. This could be open models, this could be closed models, like from Anthropic, from OpenAI, but they could also be the Chinese LLM open-source models. And the idea behind OpenRouter is as follows. If you are someone that has a task or a project or a business that you want to build, or largely anything, you want to figure out the cheapest way to do it, the most cost-efficient way to do it, but also using the smartest models when and where it makes sense. But that's sort of confusing. You would need to get manually many different subscriptions, you would need to kind of know which model to use at which different time, and then the models get upgraded and then you don't know which one to choose, like are you using GROK? Am I using Cursor's model? Am I using ChatGPT? Am I using Claude? I don't know. OpenRouter basically solves all of that problem for you. So you type in a prompt into a simple chat box in the same way that you would in ChatGPT and it has a smart route on the backend that determines which model to use at which specific time. It saves people so much money and it's given much better answers on average. Now, you mentioned they're using or they're processing around 30 trillion tokens a week at this point, 100 trillion tokens per month. This is up, I think, 15x from last year and it's up 5x or 6x in the last six months alone. These guys are like absolutely churning out money, $50 million ARR every single year. And so the idea here is why would Stripe buy a company like this? Well, the answer is pretty simple. When you look at what Stripe does, they basically looked at the financial system. They looked at banks. They looked at how people transact money and they thought, hmm, this is really clunky. This is really siloed. We are going to build on top of this and make it a really smooth process to create a transaction, to pay for something, to sell your goods or service. They then looked at AI and they thought, huh, AI is going to eat our entire business up. And these tokens, these AI tokens that people are like prompting and using look very similar to money. And I see that OpenRouter has pretty much the same business model that we have. How do we get access to this AI world? We should just buy OpenRouter. That's pretty much what they did.

**Josh** (3:23)
Even in their own words, their stated thesis is to be the economic infrastructure for AI. Traditionally, when you are an AI agent going to make payments, you are subject to the traditional rails of a human being, which is 30 cents and 2.9 percent fees. So anytime you want to pay online with a credit card, that's what you're paying when you pay through Stripe. It's a serious amount of money when it's done at the scale that they're dealing with, which is $3 trillion of money per year. So how do you get around that? Well, you have to build this infrastructure layer. And when Stripe's building the infrastructure layer, you could view it as small different parts of it. So they have Bridge, it's stablecoin infrastructure, it's crypto, there's much lower fees. Then in June of 2025, they acquire Privy, which is a embedded wallet specific for agents. Then in September, they acquire Agentic Commerce and they start to build this agentic layer on top of it. Then they build their own blockchain in March, 2026 And now they are making a bid for OpenRouter.