Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for about $10B

Posted by julien_c 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by digitalhobbit 1 hour ago

Not sure how I feel about this. I'm a fan of OpenRouter; it's a super convenient way to work with a bunch of different model providers. Good usage tracking etc. as well.

If Stripe acquires them, I worry that they'll slowly destroy the service, like they did with LemonSqueezy 2 years ago.

Comment by IronWolve 1 day ago

I've used openrouter, they work well, it was easy to use. Swipe wants to be used for agent payments, seems like a good match for them.

Comment by dd8601fn 23 hours ago

How does openrouter help them get to that?

Comment by Slartie 23 hours ago

OpenRouter is basically a payment system for LLM tokens. Yes, it does route TCP connections from you to an inference providers' cloud, too, but what is way more important is that it routes money from your wallet to inference providers'wallets.

The latter is the core business of Stripe. For them, buying OpenRouter to become the premier channel for LLM token money makes perfect sense. At least if you assume that the current state of labs offering heavily subsidized subscriptions directly is only temporary and the future lies in people buying tokens and switching between models fluidly - and I consider that the future, in light of the recent developments with Kimi K3.

Comment by dd8601fn 12 hours ago

Are they doing something novel there?

I had assumed they’re just reselling inference, where they’re “routing money” the way Walmart is “routing money” from my wallet to whoever makes Cheez-Its.

Are they doing something unique from resellers there?

Comment by Slartie 11 hours ago

They are reselling inference. That is not a novel concept, indeed, a stationary merchant like Walmart does conceptually the same. Although since inference doesn't require any stockkeeping, I would rather compare it to Amazon Marketplace.

But it's been novel for inference services when OpenRouter was founded. And nowadays they have a considerable foothold in the market. There are competitors, but the one everyone knows is OpenRouter.

And since they do not need to maintain any stock, don't need to do anything with queries but route them through 1:1, the most complex thing they do from a business perspective is that they collect your money and route the right amounts to various inference providers that served you.

Comment by victorbjorklund 22 hours ago

Crazy valuation but not a bad idea. Makes sense for stripe to wanna be the middle man for AI just like they are for payments.

Comment by moojacob 1 day ago

Makes a lot of sense. If Stripe owned openrouter, they could ditch the 5% fee on top of tokens and make money from Stripes credit card fees.

Comment by everfrustrated 20 hours ago

As Visa/MasterCard stock price is partly a reflection of the economy at large, I suspect Stripe wants their company valuation to be a reflection of the AI economy.

Comment by otterley 1 day ago

Assuming this is true: But why? And how is this valuation justified?

Comment by prtmnth 1 day ago

See projects.dev by Stripe. My best hunch is - Stripe wants to get in on the infrastructure/rails layers being built for AI. They aren't sure what that is going to be exactly (nobody does). OpenRouter seems like a safe bet.

Comment by random3 1 day ago

To ensure agents are paid through them and maintain market position https://stripe.com/blog/giving-agents-the-ability-to-pay

Comment by anukin 1 day ago

Stripe controls parts of APIs for money movement across world. This is just a logical extension to that.

Comment by shelled 22 hours ago

Such great time to be pets.ai.

Just a tangential thought from our times.

Comment by woeirua 1 day ago

I don’t get it. There’s no moat here. OpenRouter isn’t hard to rebuild.

Comment by 9cb14c1ec0 18 hours ago

There are in fact zillions of similar services. OpenRouter is the one everyone knows.

Comment by victorbjorklund 22 hours ago

Facebook/instagram/uber/etc is easy to rebuild. The value isn’t in the code.

Comment by glimshe 19 hours ago

The value in social media is the network. People stay on Instagram because their friends and the people they follow are there.

Open router has no such thing. You can immediately leave it for a copycat and hardly notice it.

Comment by Slartie 11 hours ago

OpenRouters moat is that a) everyone knows it, but not their gazillion competitors, and b) their API URLs and key are already configured in your OpenCode/Oh-my-Pi/whatever harness or agent you use.

As long as they offer stable services and do charge the same API prices as competitors (or even less maybe, since they have the most inference providers on board, because OpenRouters' prime popularity also exists with inference providers) you do not really have an incentive to go through the hassle of changing all your configurations.

Comment by glimshe 10 hours ago

What you just wrote isn't a moat at all. One is marketing, the other is a find/replace.

A "moat" is something that protects your product that is really hard to overcome. Like a migrating your database to another vendor, for instance... Or finding your friends and the people you follow on another social media service.