Stripe to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter in $7 Billion Deal

Grok with a q is raising $350,000,000 in fresh funding, valuing the AI startup at about $3,500,000,000. That's about half its peak valuation last year. The round set to be announced today was led by investment firm, Disruptive, with NVIDIA also set to invest according to a group representative. The company plans to use some of its recent financing to expand its total data center capacity to more than 200 megawatts by next year. This was a big one. Stripe is making a major AI bet, clinching a deal to buy OpenRouter for more than $7,000,000,000 according to sources. The startup gives developers access to hundreds of AI models and could expand Stripe's foothold in the AI sector. Bloomberg's Natasha Mascarenhas. Who else? Part of the team that wrote the story? This was a big one. I saw lots of people share it in real time. You know, Stripe is big, and this was quite a big deal for them. Yeah. I mean, this absolutely struck a chord. I mean, this is at a time when the top conversation is how to make models cheaper, how to make the usage of AI cheaper. And Open Router has, you know, founded in 2023, kind of soared as a result of helping developers access different models, optimize different models, and the Stripe buy is a sign of the value of that creation. I mean, a big guiding question for me, this entire AI boom has been who's going to capture the value and who's gonna create it. And so very interesting and big news for open routers. Very quick. $7,000,000,000 deal, but do we know how it's structured? Is this just Stripe flush with cash saying, here's 7,000,000,000? Yeah. I mean, I expect this to be a mix of cash and stock, and it's tracking for north of 7,000,000,000. Last private valuation was about 1.3, 1,500,000,000, so a pretty dramatic markup. You've been so busy for four days. On Friday, it started with you breaking the story of how one of Thrive's best funds has performed and some of the the sort of firm wide performance. You then had a follow on Saturday about them getting into Amazon among many other Yeah. Stories. Just go through with the the situation at Thrive. Yeah. I mean, the reason I was so excited to get the Thrive return numbers is really to answer the question about how much value is being captured in this era of concentration at all costs. It's this idea that Thrive, I would say, really pioneered this idea of putting 90% of the fund into your top dozen investments. A lot of people were like, that looks great if it's an OpenAI, but what does that look like when it happens across a bunch of different companies? And so the numbers show how much, value they're sitting on top of. Of course, the next thing to break there is how much they'll actually distribute to investors, which is why that open router story is so interesting. It actually shows distribution. Super quick. Amazon is a public position. Yeah. This tells us Thrive is basically expanding their public markets investment process. They wanna stay focused, but I broke news that they're investing around 200,000,000 into Amazon, and that comes about two months after putting around a 100,000,000 into Shopify.