After months of rumors and “no comments,” this weekend, Stripe reportedly agreed to acquire breakout inference router OpenRouter for more than $8 billion. OpenRouter is effectively a marketplace for inference. It’s a toolkit that lets users easily move between different models and providers, making one call to Claude for this task and another to DeepSeek for that one, all through the same interface. Co-founded in 2023 by former OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah, the company has been around for only three years and was valued at just $1.3 billion as recently as May.