Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Payments processor Stripe has agreed to buy start-up OpenRouter for $8bn, in the Irish-American company’s largest acquisition as it seeks to position itself at the centre of the AI economy.
Stripe, led by brothers Patrick and John Collison, on Wednesday said it would buy OpenRouter, a New York-based marketplace that allows companies to switch between different AI models. The companies agreed on an $8bn cash and stock deal, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The move is part of Stripe’s effort to support AI companies dealing with challenges including high demand for computing power, AI agents making payments on behalf of customers and new fraud threats.
“Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI, and together with OpenRouter we’ll help businesses maximise profitability by routing their requests intelligently and spending their tokens efficiently,” said Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder and chief executive. Tokens track units of text, code or data processed by large language models.
Stripe, which has dual headquarters in Dublin and San Francisco, has also launched a joint bid with private equity group Advent International to acquire US-listed PayPal in a deal that would value the company at about $53bn, according to people familiar with the matter.
This would be a transformative deal for Stripe, which was valued at $159bn in a February tender offer and has repeatedly indicated that it is in no rush to go public.
Stripe has been on an acquisition spree as it expands into the digital assets and AI sectors. Last year it bought stablecoins company Bridge a few months before President Donald Trump signed the Genius Act in July 2025, which established a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins.
It also bought Metronome, a billing platform, earlier this year to help build “streaming payments”, a system that allows companies to pay for their AI subscriptions based on token usage rather than on a “per-seat” subscription model.
“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,” Patrick Collison said on Wednesday.
In a letter to investors, the company said the rise of a new cohort of AI companies and products had sparked demand for “better-suited financial tooling” and yielded “new challenges, such as new kinds of theft and fraud, which require sophisticated advances to be effectively mitigated”.
Stripe is also working on building infrastructure for the highly anticipated era of “agentic commerce” whereby AI agents are expected to make payments on behalf of customers.
OpenRouter was founded by Alex Atallah, who previously founded non-fungible tokens marketplace OpenSea. Investors in the company include Alphabet, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz.
“OpenRouter will continue to operate as it is: same name, same product, same roadmap, same mission,” Atallah posted on X. “But now, we will do it faster, and with Stripe’s unparalleled excellence and reach.”
