OpenRouter: from Seed to Stripe — with Alex Atallah & Anjney Midha

Stripe acquired model routing platform OpenRouter for $7B. In this episode, co-founder Alex Atallah and investor Anjney Midha trace its path from being dismissed by VCs as 'just a wrapper' to handling over 10 trillion tokens per day. They discuss why model labs spend billions on training yet fail at distribution, how Mistral's price war proved the inference marketplace, and OpenRouter's early failed model fusion experiments that were revived years later. Anjney also explains why Stripe's fraud infrastructure matters strategically for OpenRouter and warns that the next wave of fraud will come from autonomous agents attacking token flows.