Stripe pursues OpenRouter as Relay closes and Groq raises 350 million dollars
Stripe is reported to be pursuing an OpenRouter deal above 7 billion dollars; Relay is closing as its founder returns to Google, while Groq raised 350 million dollars for cloud growth.
Artificial Intelligence··Morning
Stripe prepares an OpenRouter deal above 7 billion dollars
Citing Bloomberg, The Decoder reports that payments company Stripe is acquiring OpenRouter, which routes requests across AI models, for more than 7 billion dollars. The startup had raised 113 million dollars in May at a valuation of 1.3 billion dollars. OpenRouter lets customers pick between different models according to the task and the budget; it has 8 million users and access to more than 400 models. Its investors include Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures and Alphabet's investment arm CapitalG. Chief executive Alex Atallah had described the company as Stripe for AI, because it offers a single access point and prevents lock-in with any one provider. The deal moves Stripe, which already handles high volumes of latency-sensitive requests, into the token economy.[1]
Relay is shutting down as its founder returns to Chrome product
Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool launched in 2021 with the aim of replacing Zapier, is shutting down. Founder and chief executive Jacob Bank is returning to Google as vice president of product for Chrome. In an announcement shared on Monday, Bank said paying customers lose access on 14 September while free users already lost access on 15 August, and that the closure was first announced in July. According to his LinkedIn, Bank will lead the product and developer relations teams for Chrome. He first joined Google in 2015 when it acquired his scheduling app Timeful, and he served as product lead for Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Chat before leaving to start Relay. TechCrunch says it reached out to Google and to Relay for more information.[2]
Groq raises 350 million dollars for its cloud turn
Groq, which has turned from an AI chipmaker into a cloud provider running Nvidia systems, has raised 350 million dollars. The round led by investment firm Disruptive values the company at 3.5 billion dollars, with Nvidia planning to take part. The valuation is below the 6.9 billion dollars the company reached last September; a Groq spokesperson told TechCrunch that they do not see this as a down round and that it establishes a new valuation for the company after the Nvidia licensing deal. A few months earlier Nvidia had hired founder and chief executive Jonathan Ross and other senior staff under a licensing deal worth 20 billion dollars. Groq today operates 13 data centres across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific and says it serves 6 million developers and enterprises; it plans to scale from 54 megawatts to more than 200 megawatts in 2027.[3]
