When Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison took the stage at the payment company's annual conference in April, he declared it "Day 119 of the singularity."

Collison, among the more well-known billionaire entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, had long been a prominent voice about the transformational potential of AI.

But his payments company, which had aggressively sought to embrace and adopt AI, wasn't as close to the action as foundational startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.

That changed with Stripe's purchase of OpenRouter, a company with 90 employees that helps developers cut costs by steering their requests to a variety of AI models. Stripe paid more than $7 billion for the company, which had been valued at $1.3 billion earlier this year.

On Wednesday, the two companies announced the deal. In a statement, Collison said that "tokens are the central currency for companies building with AI, and it's clear that the real-world economic potential will depend on making good use of scarce compute resources."

It is the largest-ever acquisition for Stripe, which was founded in 2010 and has remained a private company. In a letter to investors, Collison suggested Stripe is better off as a private company because of the "singularity," tech speak for the moment when AI becomes more capable than humans.

The deal will expand Stripe's AI business, giving the payments company a bigger role in the rapidly growing market for AI tokens, the central unit of measurement for processing AI queries. Owning OpenRouter gives Stripe-which provides payment-processing software, helping companies accept internet payments-a way to profit directly as businesses spend more on AI models, on top of the revenue it generates from processing their payments.

It also represents the successful second act for New York-based OpenRouter founder Alex Atallah, who previously co-founded a marketplace for nonfungible tokens, OpenSea, during the cryptocurrency craze. OpenSea earned a peak valuation of $13.3 billion before its business plummeted because of a crash in NFT sales volume.

Atallah is among a wave of entrepreneurs from the crypto boom who have pivoted to AI, part of a migration of leaders from earlier technology eras into the industry. Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are all working on new AI companies.

People close to Atallah describe him as someone with a knack for spotting emerging technology trends early. Early in his career, he worked as a forward-deployed engineer at Palantir before moving through a pair of startups, one in human resources and another focused on anonymous social polling that he describes on LinkedIn as a "millennial Nielsen."

As the popularity of cryptocurrency reached new heights in 2018, he started OpenSea. The startup's value skyrocketed thanks to the surge in trading of digital artwork like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 internet apes that sold for millions and were endorsed by celebrities like Paris Hilton and Gwyneth Paltrow.

At its peak, OpenSea crossed $5 billion in total monthly trading volumes. But amid the crypto collapse in 2022, NFT sales volumes dived and never recovered as investors soured on the assets.

Atallah started OpenRouter in 2023 with Chris Clark and Louis Vichy. OpenAI had recently launched ChatGPT, and Anthropic had just introduced its first large language model. As his startup grew, Atallah began referring to OpenRouter as the "Stripe of AI."

The startup rose as much of Silicon Valley was betting that OpenAI and Anthropic would dominate the market. OpenRouter had the opposite view: that no single model would win, and developers would increasingly use many of them for different tasks.

That bet has paid off as a wider range of models has gained traction-including cheaper Chinese offerings like Moonshot AI's Kimi K3-and as businesses look to rein in AI costs.

For Stripe, the deal comes during a period of expansion. The company, last valued at $159 billion, is also seeking to acquire PayPal alongside private-equity firm Advent International.