Global payment giant Stripe has officially confirmed that it has finalized the acquisition of the well-known AI model routing and gateway platform OpenRouter. Insider sources revealed that the final amount of the transaction reached approximately $7.5 billion, far exceeding its valuation of $1.3 billion when it completed a $113 million Series B funding round in May, achieving an astonishing surge of more than five times.

As a hot underlying infrastructure in the current AI field, OpenRouter provides developers with an efficient unified entry point that dynamically routes requests to hundreds of different AI models based on users' actual needs, task complexity, price, and reliability. The platform has now integrated over 400 to 500 mainstream models, has over 10 million global users, and processes more than 10 trillion tokens daily. Its massive traffic and scheduling data have high scarcity in the industry.

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Regarding the operational planning after the merger, OpenRouter has confirmed that it will continue to operate independently under its original name and mission, maintaining its core product roadmap unchanged, and routing decisions will always prioritize user interests. The transaction is expected to be formally closed within the next few weeks.

Regarding the strategic intent behind this major acquisition, industry analysts believe that Stripe aims to deeply integrate advanced model selection and routing mechanisms into its own payment metering stack. With the rapid explosion of the agent economy, companies in the future will not only need to manage conventional revenue streams but also precisely control massive token consumption flows. By combining the payment system with the reasoning routing layer, Stripe has successfully secured the core node of AI consumption and the operation of the intelligent economy.