OpenRouter: from Seed to Stripe — with OpenRouter’s Alex Atallah & AMP’s Anjney Midha
OpenRouter serves 10M+ developers and 10T+ tokens/day as neutral multi-model routing infrastructure
“a company dismissed as "just a wrapper" became critical infrastructure for the AI ecosystem”
OpenRouter co-founder Alex Atallah recounts how a platform dismissed as 'just a wrapper' grew to serve 10 million developers and 10 trillion tokens per day by betting early on model diversity over single-model dominance. The Stripe acquisition signals that payment and fraud infrastructure is becoming critical to AI platforms, with token fraud from autonomous agents identified as an emerging security threat. This episode maps the maturation of AI inference from hobbyist routing layer to enterprise-grade infrastructure.