How can a middle man for api calls be worth so much? Their market share can’t be very large right? For comparison, $7B is more than market cap of Lyft, Dolby, and Alaska Airlines. What is happening?
Many people and businesses want to experiment with different models, but they don't want to sign up for a dozen different services. Businesses can make it difficult to approve new vendors. If your company is looking at 5 different vendors for tokens and teams can't agree to switch together, OpenRouter comes along with a unified interface and a single billing point.
They also become the point to add value-add services on top in a portable way. They already offer some things like automatic JSON repair, but I can see them adding functionality like leak detection tools, monitoring, alerts, and other patterns that a company can set up once and use with all of the models theirs teams need.
What I'm not so sure about is their moat. They have the brand recognition, but it seems rather easy for someone else to build what they've built. I'm a little confused about why Stripe didn't just build the same thing internally. Acquiring this company gives them an instant boost of 10 million customers for their AI business, which might be key to some financial goal they've got.
>Many people and businesses want to experiment with different models, but they don't want to sign up for a dozen different services. Businesses can make it difficult to approve new vendors. If your company is looking at 5 different vendors for tokens and teams can't agree to switch together, OpenRouter comes along with a unified interface and a single billing point.
Isn't that ripe for being picked off by aws or azure? Both already have marketplaces where vendors can offer whatever cloud services they want. Both already offer first party inference service, and have contracts with all the stodgy corps where it's "difficult to approve new vendors". Not to mention they have IAM and SSO built in. Good luck bolting that onto a third party vendor like openrouter.
The other popular option is something like LiteLLM, which just has a major vulnerability that left a lot of big corps exposed. After spending a year trying to fight this battle, I’ve decided OpenRouter is worth their cut (and maybe more but don’t tell them).
What’s the angle for stripe , electrify over tokens exchange is the new money flow , and stripe wants to monetize it. 5% tax on any llm token is an amazing deal
why on earth would you trust no data is sent to China? just because you clicked a toggle?
Reddit/bluesky users seething at anthropic/openai doesn't matter, because they're not the one making the purchasing decisions for AI. Moreover all the complaints you mentioned applies to chinese AI labs as well, with the extra issue that they're beholden to the CCP. Taking the side of chinese ai labs because they're the competitors of american labs is "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic, which is just dumb. It's like those people who think the US is bad, so then go and simp for china/russia.
I don't use Reddit or bluesky bud, you're projecting.
> Moreover all the complaints you mentioned applies to chinese AI labs as well, with the extra issue that they're beholden to the CCP.
And the American labs are beholden to Trump, Hegseth and the department of war. Furthermore, our companies are consistently pursuing regulatory capture (see Dario's latest tweet) so they can establish themselves as a monopoly or duopoly.
They've scraped and stolen our data, and now they're trying to pull up the ladder behind them. I'm not naive enough to think that the CCP has my best interests at heart as an American, but I'm also not naive enough to think that Anthropic or OpenAI do either. As long as China keeps releasing open models, then the enemy of my enemy really is my friend.
Are you sure it has nothing to do with open vs. closed weights? I'd say that changes the perceived power dynamic quite significantly (although of course the labs can change this either way in no time if they so choose).
If you value data security and ensuring you're not sending data off to servers, then Anthropic and OpenAI are off the table. The security they offer is just far too weak; you have to rely on blind trust. If you deploy a self-hosted Chinese model, then you know exactly where the data is going.
"but nobody is self-hosting Chinese models!" - yes they are, at scale, in datacenters within the US. Many companies already own and operate datacenters; it's a no-brainer.
You decide the routing if you want.
I trust it because there are at least 7 billion on the line. If it came out that they were violating their contract and sending company secrets to China when they promised they won’t, they would lose literal billions for basically no gain, and possible criminal charges.
Why on earth would you think they are sending data to China after you click that toggle when they have every reason not to?
Given how permissive the architecture of the internet is from TCP/IP on up, I think you could formulate a vigorous argument backing up this assertion.
A valuation just reflects what someone thinks about the future cash flows of the business.
But yeah, it does feel a bit crazy; unsurprisingly, AI hype affects valuations of AI companies too. On the other hand, I can see the idea that some people might be betting on the idea that the big US labs are bloated and spend too much money, and that the real money is going to be in serving open-weight models, and/or in automatically combining and routing to different models based on the task at hand.
If you don’t include that it just doesn’t count those tokens.
that's why my site TrustedRouter is hosted and end to end encrypted and you can actually see what it’s doing.
That ship sailed long ago when you sold your soul to Claude.
the providers you route to will of course have their own policies, which openrouter surfaces to you through the webui and api. you can even configure automatic routing to select providers based on your policy preferences.
Pay me.
Also when people ask questions like this it usually means they're asking questions about a point in time, eg given today's numbers
But valuation should account for trajectory (where will they be in five years?)
In the hypothesized bull case for ai, they benefit dramatically from the secular tailwinds (ie unrelated to their own business strategy) of AI
So one way to consider this is it's a hedge by stripe in case AI becomes as big as some people think it is. And 7b to get in on the ai wave is a good deal in that case. And in all the other cases, it goes to zero and stripe is fine
As it turns out, it's very valuable to be the intermediary between a large number of people who want something and a commoditized market of providers. It's the middleman who captures most of the margin.
Now, AI models are not a commodity yet. But things seem like they might be heading that direction. And in a world where they are, Stripe probably wants to be that guy sitting in the middle.