Stripe has reportedly finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter, the AI model gateway startup, for more than $7 billion.

TechCrunch cited a Bloomberg report saying the talks had moved from negotiation to a deal at a price above $7 billion. The report follows a Wall Street Journal story last month that said the two companies were in acquisition talks. Stripe did not confirm the transaction, with a spokesperson telling TechCrunch that the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.

OpenRouter sits between developers and model providers, giving applications one API surface for routing requests across different AI models. That layer has become more important as teams mix models by task, cost, latency, and availability instead of standardizing on one provider.

The reported price would mark a sharp step up from OpenRouter's most recent financing. In May, the company announced a $113 million Series B at a reported $1.3 billion valuation, backed by investors including Alphabet's CapitalG, Menlo Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia. OpenRouter and its investors have described the service as infrastructure for a multi-model AI market, with claims of millions of users and access to hundreds of models.

For Stripe, the reported acquisition would extend its infrastructure role beyond payments and into the model-access layer used by AI applications. The conservative reading is still that this is an unconfirmed deal report, not a company announcement. But if completed near the reported price, it would be one of the clearest signs that model routing is being valued as core developer infrastructure.