Stripe processed $1.9 trillion last year — and is now spending to own the AI plumbing too

Stripe, the privately held payments-infrastructure company, reported processing $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025 — a figure disclosed in August 2026 that underscores its scale as one of the largest movers of money on the internet. The company was valued at roughly $159 billion based on a February 2026 employee tender offer, the kind of liquidity event Stripe has used to let staff sell shares while remaining private and avoiding a public listing.

The more revealing August news was strategic: Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter, a startup that routes software requests across different AI models, for more than $7 billion. That is a striking premium over the roughly $1.3 billion valuation OpenRouter was reported to hold as recently as May 2026 — a jump that signals how aggressively Stripe is willing to pay to position itself in the infrastructure layer beneath AI applications, not just payments.

The logic connects to where Stripe sees its business heading. As AI-native software companies proliferate, they need both to pay for model usage and to get paid by their own customers, and Stripe already sits in the second half of that loop as the payments layer. Owning a model-routing service would put Stripe closer to the first half too — the metering and orchestration of AI consumption — extending its footprint from moving money into managing the compute that AI businesses buy and resell.

Because Stripe is private, it discloses far less than public competitors like Block or PayPal, and figures such as the tender-offer valuation and secondary-market estimates are snapshots rather than the audited quarterly results public markets get. What the 2025 volume figure and the OpenRouter deal establish together is a company using its scale and private-market capital to expand well beyond card processing — a bet that the infrastructure for AI commerce will be as valuable as the infrastructure for online payments has been.