OpenRouter is basically a payment system for LLM tokens. Yes, it does route TCP connections from you to an inference providers' cloud, too, but what is way more important is that it routes money from your wallet to inference providers'wallets.
The latter is the core business of Stripe. For them, buying OpenRouter to become the premier channel for LLM token money makes perfect sense. At least if you assume that the current state of labs offering heavily subsidized subscriptions directly is only temporary and the future lies in people buying tokens and switching between models fluidly - and I consider that the future, in light of the recent developments with Kimi K3.
See projects.dev by Stripe. My best hunch is - Stripe wants to get in on the infrastructure/rails layers being built for AI. They aren't sure what that is going to be exactly (nobody does). OpenRouter seems like a safe bet.
Crazy valuation but not a bad idea. Makes sense for stripe to wanna be the middle man for AI just like they are for payments.
I've used openrouter, they work well, it was easy to use. Swipe wants to be used for agent payments, seems like a good match for them.
How does openrouter help them get to that?
OpenRouter is basically a payment system for LLM tokens. Yes, it does route TCP connections from you to an inference providers' cloud, too, but what is way more important is that it routes money from your wallet to inference providers'wallets.
The latter is the core business of Stripe. For them, buying OpenRouter to become the premier channel for LLM token money makes perfect sense. At least if you assume that the current state of labs offering heavily subsidized subscriptions directly is only temporary and the future lies in people buying tokens and switching between models fluidly - and I consider that the future, in light of the recent developments with Kimi K3.
Such great time to be pets.ai.
Just a tangential thought from our times.
Makes a lot of sense. If Stripe owned openrouter, they could ditch the 5% fee on top of tokens and make money from Stripes credit card fees.
Assuming this is true: But why? And how is this valuation justified?
See projects.dev by Stripe. My best hunch is - Stripe wants to get in on the infrastructure/rails layers being built for AI. They aren't sure what that is going to be exactly (nobody does). OpenRouter seems like a safe bet.
To ensure agents are paid through them and maintain market position https://stripe.com/blog/giving-agents-the-ability-to-pay
Stripe controls parts of APIs for money movement across world. This is just a logical extension to that.
I don’t get it. There’s no moat here. OpenRouter isn’t hard to rebuild.
Facebook/instagram/uber/etc is easy to rebuild. The value isn’t in the code.
Moving money around is harder than it seems
distribution
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027985