The figure under discussion runs to roughly eight times OpenRouter's May valuation and would hand Stripe a live read on which large language models developers pay to run.
Stripe is negotiating to buy OpenRouter, the marketplace that routes developer requests across hundreds of AI models, in a deal that people familiar with the talks say could value the startup at around $10 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A deal could be made public before long, those people said, though the negotiations could still collapse or a rival bidder could step in. The exact figure being discussed could not be learned.
The discussed figure is roughly eight times the $1.3 billion valuation OpenRouter set in a funding round that closed in May.
Founded in 2023, OpenRouter runs a single API through which developers and corporate customers can test, compare and switch among hundreds of large language models, including commercial systems from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Businesses have turned to it to keep AI operating costs in check and to avoid depending on any one model provider.
Stripe already handles the startup's billing, tax and fraud processing — a fact OpenRouter cofounder and chief executive Alex Atallah has acknowledged publicly. So what the payments firm would be buying is less the payment rails than demand-side data: a read on which models developers actually pay to use, and at what price.
Several large technology firms have also reportedly weighed offers for OpenRouter as the contest to lock up AI-infrastructure assets sharpens.
Neither company has confirmed any of the terms on the record. Weighed against OpenRouter's annualized revenue, the price is a bet on the startup's future gross margins rather than its present cash flow, in a business where routing margins have traditionally been slim. Much stays undisclosed: how the deal would be structured, whether OpenRouter would keep running on its own inside Stripe, and whether leading model providers would be at ease having their demand data pooled through a platform Stripe owns.
The unresolved question for the broader sector is whether Stripe's move now bids up other model routers and gateway newcomers as sought-after prizes, or puts rivals off chasing comparable deals.