Stripe has agreed to acquire OpenRouter, the AI model routing startup, for more than $7 billion. The deal, reported by Bloomberg, turns Stripe from the company that processes payments for AI into the company that both routes and bills for AI usage in a single stack. Advertisement What OpenRouter actually does Developers send a prompt to OpenRouter’s platform, and it intelligently routes that request to the most suitable AI model based on criteria like cost, speed, and performance. Instead of juggling API keys and billing relationships with dozens of model providers, developers get a single gateway. The platform currently offers access to more than 400 AI models and serves approximately 8 million users globally.