Patrick Collison speaks onstage during WIRED25 Work: Inside San Francisco’s Most Innovative Workplaces in San Francisco, Calif., on Oct. 12, 2018. Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED25
San Francisco-based payments company Stripe announced on Aug. 19 that it will acquire AI model routing platform OpenRouter.
Founded in 2023, OpenRouter helps businesses evaluate each AI request and directs it to the optimal model based on complexity, price, speed, and reliability.
Stripe said the startup’s platform will be used to improve efficiency while reducing token costs for AI. Tokens are units of text that AI processes, and usage is billed accordingly.
“OpenRouter is playing an increasingly important role: in the future, every business will have to manage both revenue flows and token flows. OpenRouter is the world’s leading token marketplace, helping businesses effectively allocate the new currency of intelligence capital,” Patrick Collison, cofounder and CEO of Stripe, said on LinkedIn. “We think that there’s a lot to build together.”
Collison called it by far the best way to use AI models and manage multiple inference providers.
“We believe intelligence will be multi-model: no single model will be optimal for every task, and developers need a neutral layer to orchestrate and manage them all,” said Alex Atallah, cofounder and CEO of OpenRouter.
Attallah added on LinkedIn that the company will not change its name, product, or mission.
OpenRouter said it processes more than 10 trillion tokens a day from more than 400 models and is used by Nvidia, Zoom, and Lovable.
The company is backed by top venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.
While the sale price was not disclosed, Deedy Das, a partner at Menlo Ventures, called it one of the fastest acquisitions at this scale since the seller’s founding.
“OpenRouter did it different: no hype about revenue, a completely remote workforce, no buzz around fundraising, just relentless focus on product,” he said on X.
Part of OpenRouter’s platform may align with a broader industry shift toward a focus on AI cost reduction and efficiency.
“Tokens are the central currency for companies building with AI, and it’s clear that the real-world economic potential will depend on making good use of scarce compute resources,” Collison said.
On Tuesday, Etched, an AI startup that designs inference chips to help AI models run quicker and more efficiently, was valued at $21 billion after a $700 million funding round.
Also, Palo Alto Networks CEO
said last month that AI tokens need to become 10 times more efficient and that the price of AI is a barrier for enterprises looking to fully adopt it.
Reuters contributed to this report.
