Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for ~10B

Posted by htrp 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by jnyst1985 2 hours ago

Smart move, I imagine OpenRouter’s business model is very appealing to Stripe.

Comment by chromatin 1 day ago

Extremely relevant:

Ramp Router: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987253

Comment by claw-el 23 hours ago

Maybe there were more than 1 bidder for OpenRouter… Regardless, a business like OpenRouter may be best in the form of a complement product of something else (like payment processing).

Comment by BobbyTables2 1 day ago

Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just spend $1B reimplementing it?

(Of course that is absurd, $10M would be plenty)

Comment by sds357 1 day ago

The value is in the existing customers, isn't it? Not so much the product.

Comment by kennywinker 1 day ago

What percentage of the potential market does openrouter have? Like even if they have 100% of today’s customers, they probably have like 3% of 5-years-from-now’s customers.

Comment by BobbyTables2 1 day ago

Seems like it’s also assuming in 5 years from now people will still want an AI router.

How many people even use more than one search engine?

A “search engine router” wouldn’t be very successful…

If AI tokens become unlimited like cell phone minutes, why bother routing?

Comment by bulbar 30 minutes ago

> If AI tokens become unlimited

Why would they? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't even profitable yet.

Comment by kennywinker 21 hours ago

Just another reason this would be a mind-numbingly dumb acquisition.

Comment by ikidd 15 hours ago

Nothing about this bubble makes sense. Why should this?

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by dnnehgf 1 day ago

quick you are a saas company pulling 3b cash annually how do you deploy it

Comment by bobnamob 13 hours ago

Paying dividends to shareholders used to be a thing

Comment by truthbe 22 hours ago

Damn, any alternatives?

Comment by 22 hours ago

Comment by Taikhoom2010 1 day ago

https://taikhooms.substack.com/p/why-openrouter-can-be-the-n...

Comment by evenhash 1 day ago

> it has clear platform dynamics. It is an aggregator of AI models, and once enterprises use it, that creates switching costs since all your AI expense is in one place: logs, budgets, etc, so switching would be painful and generally not make a lot of sense.

Clearly what we need is a Router Router, to avoid router lock-in.

Comment by jackb4040 1 day ago

You jest but this is basically exactly what happened in crypto.

Comment by walthamstow 22 hours ago

> It aggregate’s practially ever Large Language Model, then bundles access and takes a flat fee.

Well, at least I know AI didn't write it

Comment by thomasingalls 1 day ago

Do they have to

Comment by subarctic 1 day ago

Interesting. I guess it fits since Openrouter's main value is in consolidating payment to all these different model providers

Comment by zb3 1 day ago

Does it mean openrouter can't sustain on its own? If so, bad news, new owner 'd surely want it to be profitable, so expect price hike.. :<

Comment by BobbyTables2 1 day ago

Do sustainable tech startups actually exist?

Comment by rootsudo 22 hours ago

God, no, I hate how stripe went from a wonder child in 2014 with its propaganda spiel about “we pay all employees 70k/year” to what it is now, PayPal of the 2010s.

Comment by fractorial 1 day ago

Please, no.