Internal letter from Stripe to investors leaked: Why we must acquire OpenRouter?

Author: Stripe

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

Dear Investors:

We are writing this letter because we have just announced that OpenRouter will join Stripe. This is Stripe's largest acquisition to date. Previously, we also acquired Bridge, Privy, and Metronome. We would like to take this opportunity to discuss the position of these businesses within Stripe's overall strategy.

Stripe's mission is to drive the continuous growth of the internet economy.

In our view, a more prosperous world relies on the underlying mechanisms that support economic operations: currency, credit, different currencies, legal structures, and risk management.

We believe that the future world can and should be more prosperous than today, and that improved economic infrastructure can help make this a reality.

Singularity

"Singularity" is a vaguely defined term that may have been overused. However, we see January 1 of this year as the beginning of the "Singularity Era," and we have been operating the company based on this judgment since then.

When people mention "singularity," they often associate it with grand predictions about the future. But for us, the reason is much simpler: we see clear turning points in some long-term trends, such as a significant acceleration in the rate of new company formation. Therefore, we believe that this ongoing "qualitative change" should be taken seriously.

It turns out that Stripe's focus on building products around developers from the very beginning makes it naturally suitable for AI programming tools and agents, as they also require programmable interfaces and as simple, frictionless configuration experiences as possible.

Fortunately, because of this, many AI companies around the world have adopted Stripe.

We are also increasingly aware that building economic infrastructure for the internet is largely about building economic infrastructure for AI.

AI will bring about tremendous changes, and this is already very clear. But no one can accurately predict how it will ultimately reshape the world. Many smart predictions made in the past have already been proven wrong by reality.

In the face of this uncertainty, we remain cautious and have established two key goals.

First, we hope to accelerate the adoption of AI throughout the economic system.

As AI continues to expand what people can do, we are seeing a plethora of exciting new products and services emerge, and this is likely just the beginning. More astonishing creations will emerge in the future, and they will require financial tools that are different from those of the past and more suited to the AI era.

At the same time, the proliferation of AI in the economy has also brought new challenges, such as new types of theft and fraud, which require more advanced technological means to address effectively.

Ultimately, people's greatest expectation of AI is that it can make society more prosperous. We hope to help make this possibility a reality.

Second, there are concerns that AI will cause unemployment or further concentrate power, or even both.

We believe that the application of AI should enhance human autonomy rather than diminish it. Economic autonomy is a foundational element of a free society, and Stripe hopes to play a role in protecting this autonomy.

We hope that AI will enable more people to start companies and allow these new businesses to operate more efficiently, coexisting and competing with established enterprises that already hold advantages.

Current early data does support this judgment, and we have recorded related changes through channels like Stripe Economics Substack, but no outcome is guaranteed.

As steadfast supporters of small companies, we will do our best to keep this path open.

We still believe that there is no fixed upper limit to the scale of the global economy. The current global economic total is slightly above $100 trillion. While this may sound incredible at first, we believe it is meaningful to envision a world where the global economy reaches $100 trillion and to seriously identify the bottlenecks to achieving this goal.

If the global per capita GDP could reach Ireland's current level of about $100,000, we would have already achieved about 80% of this goal.

Currently, over 5 million businesses use Stripe, and the volume of funds processed by Stripe is approaching 2% of global GDP.

This is a good start.

However, compared to the scale that could realistically be achieved in the coming years, these numbers are still insignificant.

What We Are Building

From a macro perspective, the global economy is expected to grow significantly in the future.

From a micro perspective, the way businesses operate is also changing rapidly.

Existing companies are adjusting their business models. Usage-based billing is on the rise, while many traditional billing models are declining; companies are also rapidly launching new products and services, making speed and flexibility increasingly important.

The pace of new company formation is accelerating.

AI agents are about to become true economic entities.

Stablecoins are rapidly gaining popularity. As stablecoins gradually become the native currency of the AI economy, this trend is likely to accelerate further.

As tokens can easily flow across borders, global coverage capability has become more important than ever.

We are building the economic tools needed for this era as quickly as possible.

After the native stablecoins support is combined with agent access capabilities, a new set of foundational components for the AI economy is forming:

• Discovery + onboarding: Stripe Projects, enabling agents to register for third-party services; Stripe Directory, providing product and service discovery for agents; Provisioning API, offering embedded registration capabilities for agents.

• Usage management: Metronome.

• Payment: Bridge, responsible for stablecoin orchestration; Stripe Agentic Commerce Suite; Tempo, a blockchain for agents; MPP, or Machine Payment Protocol.

• Fund storage: Privy, providing crypto asset and stablecoin wallets; Open Standard, a new stablecoin.

As time goes on, we expect the composition of the entire tech stack to change as well: the tech stack built for the "AI economy" will gradually gain more share from the tech stack built for the "pre-AI era."

However, this transition may not occur in a very obvious manner. We are deeply integrating these capabilities into Stripe's existing products and platforms, making it easy for any business to adopt.

To ensure that Stripe plays as significant a role as possible in this new phase, we are closely monitoring the adoption of Stripe by a select group of the fastest-growing and most important new companies globally.

Currently, 88% of the companies on the Forbes AI 50 list are using Stripe, including OpenAI and Anthropic. Among the remaining 12%, most have not yet entered the commercialization stage.

In the recently released Brex fastest-growing startup list, 100% of the companies are using Stripe.

Most of these companies are using more than 10 Stripe products. Meanwhile, the revenue share from AI companies and crypto businesses for Stripe is growing at more than double the year-over-year rate.

We hope that over time, Stripe's growth can keep pace with the adoption of AI throughout the economy.

OpenRouter

Looking at the bigger picture, we see that capital and intelligence are becoming two digital flows that support every business.

In the past, every developer needed a simple and reliable way to manage their revenue streams, and this need gave rise to Stripe.

In the future, every developer will also need a simple and reliable way to manage their "intelligence flow."

This observation is what initially drew our attention to OpenRouter.

OpenRouter has established the largest and most trusted token routing engine globally, supporting all major models and model providers, and is well-loved by customers.

Thanks to the practicality of the product itself, the outstanding capabilities of the founder and the OpenRouter team, and the constant emergence of new models each week, its business is growing at an extremely fast pace, even by AI industry standards.

Since the beginning of this year, OpenRouter's token consumption has been growing at a compound rate of 9% per week.

OpenRouter is very useful for almost all developers, and Stripe itself is one of the largest developer platforms globally. Therefore, we believe that combining these two core needs will bring many conveniences and efficiencies.

But beyond convenience, we believe there are deeper reasons for promoting the integration of the two.

In the process of collaborating with customers, we gradually realized that "intelligence" is a very special resource: it is expensive, diverse in form, and always in rapid flux.

Like financial capital, businesses must consciously and meticulously measure the cost and return of every unit of intelligence invested.

How valuable is this task?

Which model is best suited to accomplish it?

Who pays for it? When do they pay? If payment is delayed, how much is that time itself worth?

In fact, we have already seen directly in our products that there are many similarities between managing intelligence and managing capital.

For example, Stripe Radar was initially designed to prevent financial fraud, but today, it has proven to be very effective in preventing token fraud in many of the world's largest AI companies.

The same goes for Metronome. Industry leaders like Anthropic and Nvidia are using it, and it is demonstrating that in AI scenarios, usage-based billing has become inextricably linked to the provision and consumption of tokens themselves.

We expect this transaction to be completed in the coming weeks.

We are excited to extend Stripe's financial capabilities into this new domain, helping businesses allocate a new form of capital more effectively: intelligent capital.