Stripe is a payments-infrastructure company founded in 2010 by Patrick and John Collison. Its financial results have become closely tied to the AI industry: it processes payments for many AI companies, and its own products incorporate machine-learning systems for fraud detection and billing.
Financials
Stripe generated $3.2 billion in cash in 2025 as revenue rose roughly a third to $6.8 billion, driven in part by payment processing for AI companies, per July 22, 2026 reporting; the company was valued near $159 billion in a February 2026 tender offer, and the cash position was reported as setting up an acquisition hunt (Source: theinformation.com; stripe.com).
OpenRouter acquisition
On July 23, 2026 the Wall Street Journal reported that Stripe was in talks to acquire OpenRouter, the AI model-routing marketplace, for roughly $10 billion — up from the $1.3 billion valuation set in OpenRouter's May 2026 Series B. Stripe already handles OpenRouter's payments; the deal would move Stripe into the infrastructure that more than five million developers use to access hundreds of AI models (Source: finance.yahoo.com; pymnts.com). Reporting published July 29, 2026 stated that a price near $10 billion would be about 70 times OpenRouter's recent annualized revenue, per a person with knowledge of its financials (Source: theinformation.com).
The talks became exclusive by August 6, 2026, when a report described Stripe as in exclusive talks to buy OpenRouter in a cash-and-stock deal valuing the marketplace at close to $10 billion. Only the publisher's abstract is retrievable, and the talks are exclusive rather than concluded (Source: theinformation.com).
Bloomberg reported on August 16, 2026 that Stripe had finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, citing people familiar with the matter; the reporters were Yazhou Sun, Natasha Mascarenhas and Paige Smith (Source: bloomberg.com). The reported figure is below the roughly $10 billion described in the July and early-August accounts, and no source reconciles the two. Neither company had confirmed the deal as of August 17; a Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company does not comment on rumors or speculation (Source: techcrunch.com).
Relationships
- deploys-in: Financial Services — AI Deployment
- related: Agentic Economy, Block (Square / Cash App), Coinbase