Stripe didn’t really buy OpenRouter because of the ‘singularity’

摘要: Stripe

confirmed

on Wednesday that it was buying OpenRouter. While the company didn’t disclose the deal price, sources told the New York Times that

正文

confirmed

on Wednesday that it was buying OpenRouter. While the company didn’t disclose the deal price, sources told the New York Times that it paid $7.5 billion.

That’s a huge step up from OpenRouter’s

$1.3 billion valuation in May

. To put that price into context, the founders alone will reportedly receive $1.5 billion from the sale — more than the startup’s entire valuation just three months ago. Investors will get the remaining $6 billion, according to the NYT. Stripe reportedly had to outbid others interested in the fast-growing startup,

including Databricks.

But the question is: What does a payments giant want with a startup that routes prompts between different AI models?

The short and funny answer, according to a leaked letter from Stripe’s founders to its investors about the deal, is this: the singularity.

“It’s a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term but we decided that January 1 marked the beginning of the singularity and we’ve been operating on that basis,” they wrote in the letter,

published by Eric Newcomer

and verified by TechCrunch.

The singularity is supposed to mean the point at which humans and the tech we’ve created merge to become a new species. This is obviously a tongue-in-cheek reference (as Patrick Collison admitted when using the term at his company’s conference in April). We’re fairly certain Stripe’s founders, the brothers Patrick and John Collison, don’t think humanity started turning into The Borg eight months ago.

But they have referred to the economic uptick that AI is bringing to Stripe. With AI, more companies are being launched and more of them are using Stripe’s offerings. Stripe says that 88% of the Forbes AI 50 are using its products, including OpenAI and Anthropic, as do

100% of Brex’s fastest-growing startups.

No one knows how AI and agents will change the economy of the future, but everyone is certain it will change it dramatically.

That still doesn’t explain why Stripe wants a company mostly known

来源: TechCrunch AI