OpenRouter Financials Suggest Steep Price For Possible Acquirer Stripe

If Stripe ends up buying three-year-old startup OpenRouter for close to $10 billion, the payments firm would be paying a substantial premium of about 70 times the startup’s recent annualized revenue, according to a person with knowledge of OpenRouter’s financials.

OpenRouter, which helps app developers access hundreds of AI models, was recently generating about $140 million in annualized revenue, or roughly $12 million a month. That revenue pace is up nearly threefold since April, and the startup’s costs have been relatively low.

Still, the price Stripe has discussed with OpenRouter is remarkably high compared to other recent AI acquisitions when measured as a multiple of forward revenue.

For instance, SpaceX is paying $60 billion in stock for AI coding app Cursor, which was generating $2.7 billion in annualized revenue around March, around the time the companies agreed to the deal. That meant SpaceX was paying about 22 times the startup’s forward revenue, though Cursor’s gross profit margin was just starting to turn positive.

Cursor’s value to SpaceX went beyond its financial contribution: In addition to acquiring a substantial app business, SpaceX owner Elon Musk also wanted the Cursor team to help his company develop new AI models.

Although much smaller than Cursor, OpenRouter likely has better economics. Its costs to serve its model-routing product were recently about $40 million on an annualized basis, or 28.5% of its revenue, meaning it was generating $100 million in annualized gross profit. With a roughly 70% gross profit margin, OpenRouter was near the level of high-performing, publicly traded software firms in that regard.

OpenRouter has less than 100 employees, meaning its fixed costs are relatively low and it could be generating a profit excluding stock compensation expenses.

An OpenRouter spokesperson did not have a comment.

OpenRouter is riding fast-growing interest among businesses in using multiple AI models rather than relying only on the latest, most expensive models from major providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI. The idea behind OpenRouter’s service is to route some tasks to cheaper or more focused models, including open source ones made by Chinese firms, which has become a priority for some businesses that blew through their AI budgets when using the most expensive models.

OpenRouter’s application programming interface aggregates access to more than 400 proprietary and open source models. But it frequently routes customers to closed-source models, particularly Anthropic, said a person familiar with its business.

Anthropic-related Risk

Overall, OpenRouter is facilitating AI model usage at a rate of 250 trillion tokens per month, up from 50 trillion tokens per month in February, OpenRouter investor Deedy Das said on X. A token is a word or part of a word that an AI model processes or generates.

One potential risk for OpenRouter and its acquirer is whether it would continue to get unfettered access to Anthropic or other closed-source model providers. For instance, developers say they have run into technical issues when accessing Anthropic’s models through other apps or tools such as Cursor and OpenClaw. OpenRouter also faces a variety of new competitors, from traditional cloud providers to so-called AI inference providers that help app developers access open source models. (See the five types of AI model routers.)

Acquiring OpenRouter could help Stripe deepen its hold on AI-related payments. Stripe already processes payments for OpenRouter, major AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI, and many smaller developers. Stripe has made other, smaller acquisitions for add-on services that can boost the margins of its core processing business.

Stripe already helps businesses track AI consumption in real time and bill customers directly per tokens. Its free cash flow surged 52% to $3.2 billion in 2025, giving it more firepower for acquisitions. Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a tender offer in February, meaning a nearly $10 billion acquisition of OpenRouter could potentially represent 6% of Stripe shares if the transaction is based in stock.