Stripe agrees to acquire OpenRouter to help businesses optimize token routing and usage
Stripe, the programmable financial services company, today announced that it has agreed to acquire OpenRouter, a leading AI model gateway and routing platform. OpenRouter helps businesses route and optimize token usage across 400+ models from more than 80 providers.
Stripe provides economic infrastructure for the world’s fastest-growing businesses, including the vast majority of companies developing and building with AI. Stripe already helps businesses maximize their revenue by optimizing across a complex set of variables like payment methods, authorization rates, and fraud. Since last year, Stripe has also worked to help companies optimize their token costs and route tokens efficiently, launching products like Token Billing. But token optimization is about more than just costs. The sheer matrix of variables—which model to use for which tasks, at which speed and at what price—makes managing cost-versus-performance tradeoffs in real time extremely difficult. This challenge is exacerbated by the pace at which models are released and repriced.
OpenRouter has built a platform that helps businesses dynamically evaluate each request, routing it to the optimal model based on task complexity, price, speed, and reliability, and is already used by the likes of NVIDIA, Zoom, and Lovable. Together, Stripe and OpenRouter will be able to help companies manage both sides of profitability in the AI era: maximizing revenue and efficacy while minimizing costs.
“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,” said Patrick Collison, cofounder and CEO of Stripe. “Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI, and together with OpenRouter we’ll help businesses maximize profitability by routing their requests intelligently and spending their tokens efficiently.”
“Stripe has spent over a decade building trusted, neutral infrastructure for businesses, and OpenRouter was built on the same philosophy,” said Alex Atallah, cofounder and CEO of OpenRouter. “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. Joining Stripe lets us accelerate that mission and bring the full AI ecosystem to every business.”
