OpenRouter is the layer a lot of teams already route their LLM traffic through — one API in front of hundreds of models, with fallback and price arbitrage handled for you. The payments company reportedly finalized the acquisition over the weekend at more than $7 billion, per TechCrunch and Bloomberg. That's a steep markup: the startup was valued around $1.3 billion when it raised a $113 million Series B back in May. The read here is that Stripe wants a foothold in AI infrastructure, not just payments, and metering model usage sits right next to metering everything else it already bills for. If you depend on the gateway in production, nothing changes today — but a deal this size tends to reshape pricing and roadmap eventually, so it's worth watching who ends up owning your inference bill.