OpenRouter more than doubled its valuation in a year with its May funding round led by an Alphabet venture arm.

Stripe has reportedly finalised a deal to acquire AI marketplace OpenRouter for more than $7bn, less than three months after the New York-based start-up raised $113m at a reported $1.3bn valuation.

The Wall Street Journal, last month, pegged its value to be roughly $10bn; meanwhile, sources told Bloomberg News that the ultimate deal value could still change.

Founded in 2023, OpenRouter is a new type of marketplace that offers access to more than 500 large language models (LLMs), routing user requests to the best available AI provider.

The company claims to be the first of its kind of platform set up for LLMs, reflecting a growing appetite for AI models and a fast diversifying market. The three-year-old platform has a wide reach, boasting more than 10m users globally.

OpenRouter more than doubled its valuation in a year after initially crossing the half-a-billion-dollar mark in June 2025 and is backed by the venture arms of Alphabet, Nvidia and ServiceNow, among others. A number of other companies have also considered acquiring the lucrative business, prior reports suggested.

The start-up’s co-founder and CEO Alex Atallah has described his company as an AI equivalent of Stripe, a payments processing platform with an array of different tools for businesses.

OpenRouter already uses Stripe’s services for billing, payment collection and tax, among other needs, under a partnership announced early this year.

The Irish-founded fintech giant has been on a path to diversify its business. The company’s crypto joint venture Tempo is attempting to create an alternate financial system built specifically for AI agents to autonomously make purchases on users’ behalf.

Stripe is also reportedly considering a joint acquisition of PayPal along with US private equity firm Advent International. Stripe, backed by firms such as Thrive Capital, Coatue and A16z, hit the $159bn valuation mark earlier this year.

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