I wonder if this deal is primarily just to buy payment volume.
OpenAI just announced earlier this week that Ayden would become their payment provider (when it was previously Stripe).
And OpenRouter has a large percentage of overall AI payment volume for all the major labs.
Both OpenAI and OpenRouter represent ~$100B in payment volume, whereas Stripe in total doing ~$2T. Two customer doing ~5% of your total volume who didn’t even exist a few years ago, must be kind of scary for Stripe.
OpenAI just announced earlier this week that Ayden would become their payment provider (when it was previously Stripe).
And OpenRouter has a large percentage of overall AI payment volume for all the major labs.
Both OpenAI and OpenRouter represent ~$100B in payment volume, whereas Stripe in total doing ~$2T. Two customer doing ~5% of your total volume who didn’t even exist a few years ago, must be kind of scary for Stripe.
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/rise-ai-sho...
https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-2025-update