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Stripe to buy OpenRouter in deal valued at more than $7 billion
OpenRouter meters AI inference through prepaid “credits,” charging 5% on crypto top-ups versus 5.5% via Stripe, and charges settle on deposit rather than each request.
Stripe has finalized an agreement to buy AI model gateway OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Neither company has announced the deal, and a Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.
The reported purchase would move a major AI inference marketplace inside a company that also owns a stablecoin issuer, a wallet provider, and a co-authored protocol for machine-to-machine payments onchain, though OpenRouter’s billing uses none of that tooling. According to OpenRouter’s FAQ, users fund a prepaid credit balance held on OpenRouter’s own books, and OpenRouter deducts the cost of each LLM inference request from that balance.
OpenRouter uses an off-chain style of metering, with accounts running negative receiving an HTTP 402 error until they top up again. The settlement event is the deposit, not the request, and the company says it charges no markup on inference, only a fee when purchasing credits.
On fees, OpenRouter lists a 5.5% charge with an $0.80 minimum on purchases through Stripe, and 5% on crypto top-ups. The payments chain Tempo, which Stripe co-incubated and launched on mainnet in March, recorded 80,388 transactions over 24 hours, according to DefiLlama, and has total value locked of $38.79 million and stablecoin supply of $53.12 million.