Stripe would move squarely into the middle of how companies select and pay for artificial intelligence computing if it buys the artificial intelligence spend management firm OpenRouter. 

Stripe’s pursuit of OpenRouter – which directs work requests from software developers to AI models and tracks spending – furthers a long-held Stripe goal of evolving from a payments-focused company into a broader future as an AI infrastructure player, payments technology experts said this week.

Stripe has agreed to buy OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, Bloomberg reported Sunday citing people familiar with the matter. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Stripe would pay about $10 billion for OpenRouter, citing people familiar with the talks. The deal’s final price could still change, Bloomberg reported. 

Stripe doesn’t comment “on rumors or speculation,” a spokesperson said Monday via email. OpenRouter did not respond to an email seeking comment. 

“We think about Stripe as having inverted our value proposition from being a payments company, with sort of add-ons, to now being this multi-product platform where everything sort of focuses on financial infrastructure,” Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s president of technology and business, said during a podcast discussion released Monday.

Gaybrick joined Andreessen Horowitz general partner David George on the firm’s podcast. Neither raised Stripe’s potential acquisition of OpenRouter during their discussion. The venture capital firm has invested in OpenRouter and Stripe. 

OpenRouter was founded in 2023 to help software developers select AI models for their work tasks. The company helps developers choose which model is best for a particular job based upon factors such as the tasks’ cost, timeframe and performance.

New York-based OpenRouter raised $113 million in May and said it serves about 8 million software developers across some 400 AI models.

The corporate embrace of AI comes with the chores of deciding how much to pay for a given task and how to control overall spending on these tokens.

As AI products advance from being mere assistants to completing far more complex tasks, executives “face a new margin challenge with falling model prices subsidizing more complex workflows and escalating total AI costs,” technology research firm Gartner said Monday in a report summary on AI inference costs. 

An OpenRouter deal suggests Stripe sees “token consumption becoming a new category of business spend and they want to be in the middle of where that spend is allocated,” Toffer Grant, the founder and CEO of Pex, a spend-management software platform, said Tuesday in an email.

OpenRouter’s technology “will allow Stripe to observe data and influence purchasing behavior” as companies buy AI computing capacity and look to impose spending oversight, he said.

The AI routing business has expanded rapidly in recent years with orchestration tools now offered by dozens of startups, along with larger tech players like Google and Microsoft competing against OpenRouter and Ramp, the financial-management software company, said Louis Amira, a former Stripe executive and CEO of Circuit & Chisel, a New York software company that develops tools for digital AI agents.

“It’s not technically hard to create” an AI orchestration product, Amira said Monday in an interview. “It is hard to get the (customer) usage, but the product itself is not particularly complex.” 

Stripe is an early mover in an AI commerce space that is going to become “a land rush,” as companies move to hire digital agents and consumers adopt agentic shopping tools, said Eric Grover, a payments industry consultant with Intrepid Ventures in Gardnerville, Nevada.

“It’s perceived as a space that you want to own,” Grover said Monday in an interview. “It's an important place to be, and once the dust settles there is not going to be room for 100 different AI orchestrators.”

Enterprise spending on AI tokens – and the related goals of optimizing AI usage and expense – has given Stripe a “mandate” to help customers manage their tokens, Gaybrick said in the 54-minute podcast. “There’s this blurring that you see between tokens and dollars,” he said.

Over time, he added, companies will turn to digital agents to complete work with payments in tokens just as a business pays human employees with dollars.

“We just want to make sure that moving between tokens and dollars is as seamless and safe as moving between dollars and euros,” Gaybrick said. “We’re at the beginning of this journey, but we think it’s going to be a big part of the future of Stripe.”