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.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/rise-ai-sho...

https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-2025-update

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chr-s an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Adyen just bought Orb [0], a usage-based billing company, for $335M, specifically so they could position themselves as the payments choice for AI companies.

[0] https://www.withorb.com/

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hrududuu an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OpenAI is a large company, and large companies go multi processor for payments. I would check the press release carefully, and see if you can confirm that Adyen is taking all of OpenAI's volume, or even a majority of it.

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tyre 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Stripe would lock in volume but how exactly are they monetizing that? Any margin the get from OpenRouter is money extracted from OpenRouter’s revenue (which is now theirs.)

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giancarlostoro 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

7 billion one off for 100 billion annually? If I am understanding that correctly it feels like a no brainer to me…

Also if you think about it differently… OpenRouter is adjacent to what Stripe is but for getting access to AI models. If they dont mess this up they could invest in openerouter and grow that 100b pie.

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notatoad 3 hours ago | parent [-]

$100b is payment volume, not revenue. Stripe gross revenue from those payments would be on the order of tenths of a percent of that.

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giancarlostoro 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Plus the platform fee that OpenRouter makes? 5 billion a year?

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sanxiyn 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think volume is itself good and help Stripe negotiate lower rate with banks etc.

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bhouston 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Two customer doing ~5% of your total volume who didn’t even exist a few years ago, must be kind of scary for Stripe.

Shopify uses Stripe no? Probably good volume discount though.

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sparkling 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>OpenRouter represent ~$100B in payment volume, whereas Stripe in total doing ~$2T.

That is a much higher % than i expected.

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Marciplan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Adyen*

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huflungdung 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]