Stripe has reportedly finalized an agreement to acquire AI model gateway OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. Neither company has announced the deal, and a Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.

OpenRouter operates as a marketplace for AI inference, routing API requests across competing model providers through a single endpoint. It bills users through prepaid credit balances held on its own books, deducting the cost of each request from the deposit. This design settles payments off-chain, with the deposit acting as the settlement event rather than each individual API call.

The company charges a fee on credit purchases: 5.5% with an $0.80 minimum for card payments processed by Stripe, and 5% for crypto top-ups. Its support page lists accepted methods as major credit cards, AliPay, and USDC crypto, with crypto purchases non-refundable. OpenRouter takes no markup on inference, stating that users always pay the same as the provider's listed price.

The deal comes as Stripe has been building out its stablecoin and machine payments infrastructure. It completed its Bridge acquisition in February 2025, uses it to issue stablecoins for third parties, and bought wallet provider Privy in June 2025. Stripe co-authored the Machine Payments Protocol with Tempo, a chain it incubated with Paradigm that launched on mainnet in March. Tempo's current throughput is modest—about one transaction per second—but Stripe's founders have written that agents may require blockchains supporting over one million or even one billion transactions per second.

OpenRouter's growth has been substantial. The company said it was on pace to process over a quadrillion tokens this year, and its homepage lists 200 trillion monthly tokens, 10 million users, more than 80 providers, and over 500 models. It raised a $113 million Series B led by CapitalG, with participation from NVIDIA's NVentures, ServiceNow Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Ventures, and MongoDB Ventures. Reports value that round at $1.3 billion, implying the Stripe price is roughly a five-fold markup in under three months.

OpenRouter was already a Stripe customer, using Stripe Invoicing, Tax, and Radar to bill more than 5 million developers. The acquisition would give Stripe control of a major AI gateway, potentially integrating it with its stablecoin and machine payment rails. However, OpenRouter's deposit model does not require a blockchain, and neither company has said whether the two will be connected. The deal also places a payments company in charge of a router that sits between developers and model providers including Anthropic and OpenAI, raising questions about neutrality.