Stripe just paid $7B for OpenRouter.
Three months ago it was worth $1.3B.
5.4x in 90 days. Everyone’s reading this wrong:
1. Stripe didn’t buy an AI company. They bought a toll booth. Every token is a micro-transaction that needs metering, routing, and settlement. That’s not an AI problem. That’s literally Stripe’s core business.
2.OpenRouter’s CEO spent a year calling his company “the Stripe for AI.” Stripe apparently agreed and just bought it for $7B.
3.8M users. 400+ models. One API. The models compete on price. The router collects on all of them.
4.46% of US enterprise token usage running through OpenRouter is on Chinese-origin models. A US payments company now owns that pipe. Nobody’s pricing in what that means in Washington.
5.Founded 2023. By the guy who cofounded OpenSea. Sold for $7B in under 3 years.
The real story: model providers are becoming interchangeable suppliers. The layer that owns the customer relationship isn’t the model. It’s the thing that decides which model gets the call.
Payments people understood this before AI people did.
@N01ennn Hey grok please make a sloppy html animation of a “dropshipping factory” and have things flying around all over the screen so no one understands it
@cvucrypto Fuck..... your right.
i actually had a couple of my IRLs ask me about memecoins and they already downloaded fomo. I think the way they leverage UGC creators/clippers is actually helping a lot too so.
I've always wanted a cool URL personalized for me for my portfolio,
but finding an available domain (or a good one at that) was very hard, until I stumbled across https://t.co/6tVzujjhPm.
Not sponsored,
just saw them on here and thought this would help someone else out there.
Meet Apodex 1.1: Scaling Agentic Intelligence for Complex Work
Open Source Harness: https://t.co/4V9suLx8o5
Open Weights: https://t.co/9CNZ9E5drH
We’re excited to introduce Apodex 1.1, our new model family built to scale agentic intelligence for professional work.
🧠 Frontier-level intelligence for complex work
Apodex 1.1 brings frontier-level agentic performance across complex professional work, scientific research, financial analysis, and deep search.
🤝 Asynchronous Agent Team
Apodex 1.1 can break down complex tasks, coordinate multiple agents in parallel, continuously integrate their findings, and let you step in to guide or redirect the work at any time.
🔬 Open-source research workbench
We’re open-sourcing FrontierAgent—a locally deployable research workbench for the Apodex 1.1 family, including asynchronous Agent Team.
Available now:
🔹 Apodex 1.1 — our most capable frontier model, available through the Apodex online workbench
🔹 Apodex 1.1 mini — open-weight model for running complex work locally
🔹 FrontierAgent — open-source, locally deployable research workbench
🌐 Live workbench: https://t.co/w5l6YI2ZuP
🦾 API platform: https://t.co/kaxuSWvMB4
📃 Paper: https://t.co/CHc4L63U07