Stripe’s $7.5 Billion AI Bet: Why It Just Bought OpenRouter

Hello and welcome back to the Market Maker podcast. And on this week's episode, we are talking all things Stripe and their $7.5 billion acquisition of Open Router or Open Router. What are you going to go for in this episode? >> I think I'm going to switch it up. I I've I've been looking at our analytics and it's about 50% from the UK, 50% from the US. So, I'm going to split it up. Router doesn't really matter. >> Okay. Well, in this episode then, we're going to dive into the deal. trying to understand how a company that only raised seed capital a couple of years ago can now be worth over 7 billion US. We'll dive into Open Routter and its business model, why Stripe is acquiring the fledgling company, and then we'll look at Stripe, what is it, why does it matter, and why they announced that we have indeed reached singularity of which quick shout out for the older listeners. Uh, I just said to you, Stephen, offline when I read that in your notes, I thought my mind immediately went to the movie The Event Horizon with Sam O'Neal. So, shout out to Sam. >> Yeah. Yeah. I've never watched Event Horizon, but it's wonderful to to look at it to look to look it up on on Google and to see that it's IMDb rating is 6.6, Rotten Tomatoes 36%. I assume you're bumping that number a little bit up. And >> Crikey. Yeah. The nice not good is it? Shows my movie movie selection. But just before we begin, I've just literally come back from Morgan Stanley just delivering a program to 17 year olds actually preun university and two of them came up to me and said and so thank you so much. The podcast I've just got accepted onto the Goldman's Fick and Equities apprenticeship program and the podcast was one of the key components of getting through the application process. And then two, another young lady said she's studying nothing to do with finance and this podcast was her first interest to get the ball rolling and now she's at Morgan's family. So, >> well, that's amazing. >> I'm going to do my own shout out as well. I I spend the weekend with my sister-in-law who doesn't doesn't do anything to do with finance, but she listens every single week. So, shout out to Hannah. Cool. Well, look, let's let's get straight in then. So, Stripe acquires Open Router for $7.5 billion US. So, what's the the headlines here to take away? Yeah. So, this is the acquisition by Stripe, which as of earlier this year is valued at $160 billion. Not bad. But also, it's a company that processes, and this is a mind-blowing statistic, Stripe processes about 1.6% 6% of the world's GDP. That is why this is an important episode to run. It's acquiring a three-year-old startup, Open Routter, at a somewhere around 7 to 7.5 billion. We don't know precisely what the terms of the deal are. Stripe are not always that forthcoming with regards to the specifics of these deals, but Stripe's a private company, so it doesn't necessarily have to be. So, Open Routter, there was a thought that this company was going to be worth upwards of $10 billion. This was discussed earlier on this year as as recently as July. But still, a $7.5 billion price tag nets the three co-founders, Alexa, Chris Clark, and Louis Vishi $1.5 billion. >> Not bad. Years of work. Well, they're not as good at the guys over at Cursor though, are they? >> Do you reckon they're thinking about that? Do you reckon they're thinking, "Wow, we've just pocketed $500 million, but >> not >> that's how these guys roll." No, you know, that's that's why they're successful people. >> Do you think the uh the the houses the homes of the cursor founders are kind of commensurately bigger on a square foot basis than the houses of the open routine? >> Well, let's look. It's one of those things. There's probably someone who listens who knows someone who knows Alex Atela so he can uh he can let us know. >> Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Let's hope they go and do good things with their money like buy massive super yachts and maybe even a sports franchise, you know, give something back. >> So, of this then um this like you just said, it's not a very old company. So, talk me through how they went through their inception and I'm I'm assuming seed to venture capitalist money to then put the turbo boosters behind the growth of this company. So, what what did that look like and who was involved? Who are some of the VC names that people should be aware of? Yeah, this is a this is another this is another example a little bit like as we discussed with cursor and other companies on this podcast. This is another example of just as of things just speeding up. The world seems to be speeding up. The speed at which companies get to $100 million of run rate revenue seems to be getting shorter and shorter. The speed by which you go from being a local domestic company to an international global company seems to be going from years to months to weeks. And is quite remarkable how you can go from being nothing seed stage in between December 24 and June 2025 they raised a couple of rounds. So that was what a year and a bit ago at a $60 million valuation led by A16Z and Seoia. Not bad. Then in June 2025, so stepping out of the seed phase June 2025, they raised at a a series A at a $500 million valuationish led by Menllo Ventures of the Menllo Park in in Silicon Valley. And then series B note this date series B May 2026 amount raised 113 million post money valuation 1.3 billion so led by capital G which is a uh the alphabet Google VC arm N ventures Nvidia datab bricks ventures the venture studio from datab bricks snowflake ventures MongoDB ventures ES and then ACX16Z and Menllo Ventures. So this is just a massive pilein from a load of the AI leaders and infrastructure providers into this company Open Routter. Fast forward from May 2026, which seems like yesterday, to August 2026, they are now being sold for upwards of $7 billion to Stripe. >> What's the >> Absolutely crazy. >> That is crazy. That's phenomenal. What's the thought path of the founders then? Why not wait? Why not wait literally another two weeks and then get another billion on top and get another couple of tens of million in my pocket? So, how does that work? Oh, it's a really interesting one. There's so much of a art to when you sell your company and you want to be selling your company with enough uh history of breakout hypersonic growth, but with enough expectation and hype that that growth is just going to get bigger and bigger and more hypersonic and more crazy. Right? So you've got to have proved your concept, but you've also got to showcase that this is going to be much much much much bigger. So yes, they could have waited a few more weeks, but seven $7 billion has kind of priced in the fact that they are growing the they're doubling their token consumption every 11 weeks or token throughput every 11 weeks. That's already been priced into the deal. So if in a few weeks time things start to slow down even just a fraction, you'll probably get a significant haircut to the 7 billion as opposed to a a premium. So timing in these venture capital hyperrowth companies, timing is everything. And I'm assuming that there's probably less risk associated with doing this pre rather than postanthropic listing. >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think I think open router has been on the on the stripe cards or kind of in the crosshairs of stripe for I was going to say quite a long time but nothing is quite a long time in this world. Uh so it might well have happened pre-anthropic postanthropic because this is a private company acquiring another private company. There's a little bit less sensitivity in terms of valuation. But you're right, if Anthropic had gone out there and absolutely bombed, the the good vibes might have gone away. But we'll talk about Strike in a few minutes. And they are all in mega balls about the quadrillion dollar economy and as you mentioned the Singularity as well. It's a final question before we we move on. Sequoia Capital, so they were in on the seed series A. just talk to me a little bit like what what does a normal what does a team look like at Sequoia and what sort of relationships they fostering? What are their interactions with the this young talent emerging out of these centers in Silicon Valley? >> Yeah, I mean the world of venture capital is so remarkably driven by network and and therefore the rain makers i.e. the the partners, the SEOA partners, of which there's only a few uh and they're based around the world, but predominantly in Silicon Valley. They will be the ones that hold all of the long-standing relationships, and they will be getting the deal flow probably before anyone else. But your job as an analyst or associate working underneath that partner, working for a particular fund, one of Seoia's large venture capital funds, your job is going to be all right, you need to be on campus. You need to be at every function. You need to be at every event. You need to be speaking to the next big thing and you need to be getting out there, right? So much of VC and it's whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I'm not sure. So much so much of it is about who you know and if you've got a brand name like Sequoia, you're going to get access to the very very best deal flow. So you can't just sit around and just hope that the pitch decks come in. But the pit the best pitch decks will go past your desk in some way, shape or form, right? They'll make it to you because you are Sequoia. Yeah. Well, makes a lot of sense. So, let let's maybe go back a step and just understand a little bit about the company that Stripe is purchasing here. So, Open Router, what exactly do they do? You've talked about it in quite quite bold terms in terms of the way it's been pitched, but what do they actually do? Yeah, open routters. It's an interesting one and again it's a company that could only have been founded in the last couple of years since the proliferation of large language models. The premise behind open router is that large language models of which there are over 400 or actually now over 500 that can be accessed through open router. The premise is that large language models will and are already becoming largely commoditized and they are good and cheap and cost effective for certain different tasks. So open router almost as the name suggests basically roots companies that go through open router to the appropriate model for their particular use case. So 500 models from 80 plus providers the likes of OpenAI and and Enthropic but also importantly Deepseek and Alibaba and actually if you see the league tables on Open Routter you see that the likes of Deepseek are at the top because they're the cheapest. So purpose of open router giving a sim single API to developers within companies to tap into all of these models without having to integrate each one separately into the workflow into the payments processing. remember those two words of that particular user. And it is scaled extremely quickly to over 10 million global you uh users utilizing using 300 trillion monthly tokens on their platform. So again, as basically a broker or an intermediary, they've gone from nothing to trillions, hundreds of trillions of tokens monthly. Is there any way you could put into context for me what 300 trillion in tokens is? Is there a way to sort of like contextualize that? For most people that figure sounds ridiculous, but what would be a good comparable to understand that figure just the size of it? Okay, so to put it into a little bit of context, 300 trillion a month sounds like a lot and it is a lot and it's used a lot of um a lot of what companies use open router for is the is coding software and more kind of aentic type work. So, it's quite kind of token intensive relative to I mean, it's really hard to find good sources for how many tokens are utilized or used every single day or every single week, but Epoch AI estimates that there are 432 trillion tokens per day across all providers worldwide, which 300 trillion a month is a lot, but that puts it into a little bit of context. And just for the lay person out there like me, a short chat message, so what is the capital of France? Roughly 20 to 30 tokens used, right? A typical back and forth of a few interactions, 200 to 500 tokens and you go from there. So you see, by the way, you know, a short interaction like that is not really the use case of AI in this enterprise level context. It is the more computationally heavy or tokenheavy pieces of work that these developers are asking the LLMs through open router to complete. So, so a lot of the young people I talk to are very savvy now about, you know, the idea of the types of roles they might want to work in, types of companies. Many of them I meet are very interested in stories like what you've described in terms of the speed and creation of of what's happened with this company. What what was the initial idea then and these founders had? What were they trying to achieve and what is their background? Because I know a lot there's going to be at least one young person listening going, "Yeah, I want to do this. I want to imitate this. So what's the model to imitate?" >> Yeah. I think it's a really hard thing to try to imitate a hypers speed hypersonic model that is happening at the moment. If you try jumping on a bandwagon and it's too late, you will fall off and there are just precious moments in time where the eye of capital strikes upon a particular technology and everything goes crazy. whether it's climate technology, whether it's whether it was the uh internet 2.0, whether it was nonfgeible tokens, which we'll talk about in a second, and crypto and things like that. You you just need to be in the next big thing in order to be on this travel, this escalator that is going to get you to that remarkable 2 or threeear story. But as we've said many of times before, like for every one open router, there are dozens of companies that just don't make it. Dozens of people that are thinking, founders that are wanting to be part of the success story that inevitably are not going to try quite make product market fit and are not going to reach what the venture world calls escape velocity, where people like me and you talk about a company on a podcast for 40 minutes. But I did mention NFTTS, nonf fungeible tokens, which I think we probably spoke about on the podcast about 3 years ago. They seem to be a thing, didn't they? Um and Alex Itala who is one of the founders of open router previously worked at Apple and Palanteer before creating OpenC which you might have heard of or might remember the NFT marketplace which was valued at 13.3 billion during the height of the crypto broom boom. Do we ever speak about OpenC anymore? No. And Darius, our researcher, put a nice visual of the board eight y board ape yacht club NFTts. If you remember those things, an lots of listeners that are new to the world of finance or kind of the obscure world of finance would have never heard of this, but this was a thing if you remember. Oh, my brother was all over that. He was he he he he was seeing from the rafters because he was in the NFT. He was proper full. He was him and Mark Zuckerberg were holding hands like skipping down the street at the time and it was all looking very rosy for a for a fairly long period of time until it wasn't. Yeah. And if you got out the right time, well done to you. It's a great represent a great case study in just because something is scarce doesn't mean it's valuable. It's very very important rule. Rule number one of economics. >> I was just actually having a quick look about Alex Atela because I was like well what what actually is his story? Because one of the things I was thinking was that Haggabout he's perfectly positioned timing for Open Counded it caught the entirety of the wave come out of that now he's caught this AI adoption on an enterprise scale like this guy is serial like winner from the these patterns in terms of like you said technological timing of the eye of the capital sort of deployment storm. So I just had a quick look. How old is he? 34 35. He is born in Colorado to a Colombian immigrant father and American mother. Trying to look for other early flare for data tech. Uh disguise a bit of a whiz kid. Actually graduated. So it's not like some of those stories, you know, like the Zuckerbergs of the past where it's like they just leave university straight away. He did graduate from Stanford in a bachelor of science, computer science. uh you mentioned I think earlier Palanteer Technologies started his software career in natural language search ontology management and cyber security products. So but yeah this this guy's already CTO in 2014. Yeah and again going back to the sequoia what are they looking for? They will be wanting to fund whatever comes out of Alexella's brain next. Right. If you've had one strike you're doing pretty well. If you've had two strikes, I'm listening to you. Get behind or get around this guy. I don't know if he's I don't know if he's a nice guy or not, but he's done he's he's he's certainly catching the right waves. I think there was a a quote, right, he said, Alex specifically described the firm, I guess, in talking about his own company as the Stripe for AI. What do you think about that? >> Yeah, I mean that's really interesting. It's great when you already you already bookmark or you already road sign your potential acquirer by saying we are the X for Y and by the way X if you want to require us at some point we're open to talk. What are we going to be as market maker the podcast and we are the who are we going to get sold to? >> I don't know. Professor G's media company can buy us. >> Oh no we can do better than that. Um, so one of the things then is that what we're seeing even within the the business that we run at Amplify Me is, you know, we build simulations, but I think the friction or the moat to building simulations is probably decreasing because of people can use AI to speed what was before our developers building this stuff. The output for us, our moat is our data and the breadth of we have lots of hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of students. So the data is so rich rather than used by one person. So with this, what's stopping someone else coming along and just creating a competing platform that essentially does the same thing? Yeah, it's a very very good question. So their moat, open routters moat is not a tech moat. They haven't created something that is extremely complex. It's not it's not really a complex business whatsoever, quite frankly. and and no one pretends to admit that it is. What Open Routter does have is the first mover advantage and the associated economies of scale by being the go-to uh interface or intermediary or router of choice for large corporate clients. So what can that give open router beyond brand recognition and things like that is you can have network effects on routting intelligence. So it has a thing called autorooter and it ranks candidate models by aggregate community spend on a trailing 7-day window. So the more people that use open router the better auto router gets. That is a classic network effect. The more telephones, the more useful the telephone network is the original network effect. And that's something that might provide the moat for open router. But let's just let's just think about this for a second and I'm going to talk very quickly about how the company makes money and introduce a question mark here. So open router makes money in two main ways. Firstly, they have a 5% credit top up fee when customers buy credits to spend on tokens from any one of these 500 plus models. 5%. Right? And then secondly, this concept that I am relatively new to bring your own key. So basically when companies have their own API with say anthropic, they can give the details to open router which passes through the billing. So they don't have the 5% credit top-up fee, but they have 5% fee on usages above 20 or $25,000 a month for the large enterprise clients. So, and by the way, this has resulted in revenue finishing at about $19 million in 2025, annual revenue, and it looks like it's going to be up at around $160 million in 2026. So almost 10x. This is my question mark. 5%. So any company that doesn't have a massive tech moat that is sticky but not overly sticky that is trying to charge you know multiples more than Stripe who charge on average 0.36% for their payments processing but even multiples more of the likes of Visa and Mastercard. You're thinking to yourself that is that is lunch for another company to go and take right that 5%. And it's only when you know Visa and Mastercard are two enduring incompre almost incomprehensible business models for people to study at business school you know they have managed to create global integrated ubiquity the likes of which are so so difficult to get out of so that they can command a reasonably high transaction fee. Right. And obviously lots of lots of challenges have come and gone but these two companies keep going open route with the 5% I don't know isn't that just fine though in terms of like the survival of the fittest and then the kind of evolution of it. What I mean by that is that open router knows this. They grow as fast as they can and they sell to a big fish and the big fish can't live without having this as an option within its broader offering. So isn't it just this is natural progression? >> You're absolutely right. And to your point on earlier on which is you know why didn't they just wait a few more weeks? Well in a few more weeks there might be an upstart. You know there already a lot of competitors. This is not the only router or the only intermediary out there. And in a few weeks there could be another hot company that's growing even faster that's taking the lunch of open routter. So yes, this is the natural course of things unless you are one of those generational companies like a Facebook that manages to break out of that cycle of hype then get acquired, you know. >> Okay, I just need to look up what's this Alex's uh ex handle. I I need to find out what the next thing is and just pile all in here. >> What is his what's his postal address? You know, you going to write him some fan mail? No, I mean, look, I just want to know what comes next after this. He's going to parachute out with another half a bill in his pocket. >> I mean, his ideas are just going to get bigger and better. Bigger and better, I think. Um, so here then we often talk about the AI kind of ecosystem >> and there's lots of talk ongoing always about vulnerabilities that that might have. It's quite it's circularity of investment, all these sorts of things. And then that in context of the macroeconomic climate that we're in. So is there any other signals or things in that context on the macro side that we'd need to be cognizant of with this deal? Yeah, it's definitely worth listeners if they're interested in this world, relistening to our episode on the business model of AI that we put out a few weeks ago, trying to pull apart where the economic value will reside once the dust settles from this Cambrian explosion of companies and and intelligence and and amazing new products and innovations and things like that. So ultimately, Stripe acquired Open Routter because they believe in AI models being commoditized and therefore owning the platform might be more profitable than owning a model. So there's plenty of examples of platforms being more valuable than the data or the product that lies behind it. thinking Amazon as a prime example. So if you think that LLMs are going to compete each other to death and there are just going to be ubiquitous models from different countries doing different things at different capabilities, then my gosh, Stripe, and we'll talk about Stripe in a minute, fantastically well-managed, extremely successful company that basically does the GDP of the internet, right? That's how that's what it wants to manage. It's just saying look there are two things that matter in this world and there are two things that tend to be that tend to have transaction costs and friction. Capital and intelligence. We're dealing with capital through payments processing. We're dealing with intelligence through the acquisition of the likes uh of Open Routter and a couple of their other acquisitions. So this is the way that Stripe and their two and their co-founders uh see the world. So talking of that that deal rationale then so from what we've discussed so far am I right then that the the simple way of looking at this is open routter benefits from staff resources someone like stripe who's just bigger more established a wider platform to operate from they get to improve their own offering themselves stripe gets the leading platform in man in managing this AI spend they can almost probably there's probably some premium in bumping up the AI plugin to their own perception of the value of their brand as much as the mechanical side of it. Um, and then there's tokens and and routing, selecting these best models and so forth. Is there anything else though? What's the other side of this? Am I missing something? No, I think I think you're spot on. This is this is a pretty logical acquisition and we'll talk about Stripe's wider ambitions in in a little bit. But obviously, as I've mentioned before, Stripe aims to grow the GDP of the internet. And they are so bullish on this explosion in creativity and new business formation that is coming out of the AI revolution. and they want to capture the transaction value of all of this new industrial or AI revolution. And from a dear rational perspective, yeah, as I've mentioned before, there was a letter that was released in August the 19th, a couple of weeks ago, talking about the deal rationale for open router. And in this, Patrick Collison says, "Zooming out, we see capital and intelligence becoming the two digital flows undergirling every business." And we basically want a piece of that, right? And if you think about it, at the moment, $1.9 trillion are being driven through Stripe at the moment. hundreds of millions of customers, hundreds of billions of transactions and they are earning 36 basis points or 0.36% on every dollar that goes through. Now, Open Routter owns 5% on every dollar that is processed through its platform. So, what Stripe could easily do is go, "All right, we're going to lower that 5% down to 1%." That sounds bad in theory, but we're going to push open router across hundreds of millions of businesses that are already running through Stripe. So, you lower the cost, you massively increase the market size, and you end up you end up tripling, quadrupling, massively increasing the revenue from that product. So, the deal rationale is is pretty logical. I was just looking at as well within your notes I saw the words uh the rise of agent agentic commerce. So I guess for again thinking about this in its most simplest terms agentic commerce buying and selling where autonomous AI agents do everything for you. So, in my head, I don't know why, but I imagine myself, I'm in a kitchen doing a bit of cooking, slicing a few tomatoes, and I'm speaking to uh my device. And my device then is researching, negotiating, comparing, and completing the purchase. So, I might say, for example, I don't know, I'm going on holiday, and I am tomorrow going to France, and after this record-breaking heat wave, it's going to rain every day. So, find which is a true story. So, find me a waterproof hiking boot, size 9, around €100. It could arrive by X date, for example. Now, I'm assuming depending on what it is that I'm saying I wanted to do. If I said can you create me a platform that could uh do XYZ and I want to do this more complex tasks would this be a use case where A the technology and human behavior shifts towards more agentic commerce and then b that's where the model fits in where you're going to look to optimize on costs in regards to the model that you're using to facilitate these workflows. Yeah, it's this concept of aentic commerce and it is definitely one that Stripe talks about quite a lot and I would massively recommend anyone that's interested in the space reading or listening to the Stripe annual letter comes out every year. Uh last one was a few months ago and Patrick Collison, one of the brothers, the founders talks there about the five stages of agentic commerce. And I'm not going to get every single one of them because I can't remember them. But it starts with all right, filling out forms is really, really annoying on the internet, right? So, if I could just say, here's the URL, put it into an LLM, it fills it out, and it pays. That's aentic commerce number one. And he goes through this example, I think, of buying uh buying clothes and preparing a young child for school. The next stage is, hey, I've got a kid who's 5 years old. Please recommend, as you rightly said, please recommend some shoes and recommend a backpack. Still pretty basic into an LLM. Stage three is um uh the actually this might even be stage four or five. So go back and read the letter. But eventually it gets to the stage that the AI knows that it is coming up to the new school year. Knows that little Johnny has gone from being a 6-year-old to a 7-year-old. Knows that your preferences are A, B, C, D, and E. And all you have to do is say, "Here's the budget." and everything arrives, right? That is a genetic commerce stage four or five. We're not really even at stage one. We're kind of at stage one or two. So, yes, open router will be a a fantastic plugin to the token spend related to aentic commerce, but I tend to think that those two words, Aentic Commerce, are still a little bit hyped and and still quite a long way away. >> Come on, let's let's juice this. Let's get the hockey stick out. It's it's agentic. You just need to put that word in wherever the statement is being uh published. But look, let's talk about let's talk about the other person in this in this transaction and that is Stripe. I think people sort of take for granted Stripe. It seems to be a part of everyone's daily life given the wide global um application of it. But can you explain to me what what's the story of Stripe? You mentioned the Collison Brothers. I didn't even know it was Brothers. So what's the backstory of the company? >> Yeah, so the success of Strike is largely attributed to the genius of their founders. So these are Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison. And if you know, if you've read enough newspapers over financial newspapers over the last 10 or 15 years, the profiles that they get have gone from excited to enrapured to almost adoring comments. These two grew up in a small village in Ireland with no internet access. So this is not like Bill Gates lobbying for his private school to get the first computer so that they could start coding. They learned coding through textbooks at their local library which is absolutely brilliant. So at 16, Patrick was the recipient of the 41st young scientist of the year award due to his work on the lisp programming language which is basically AI before it was AI. And then John, not to be outdone, he achieved one of the highest Irish leaving certificate grades in the country in 2009, whilst also taking up flying as a hobby and building this company, uh, Orcatic, which is an absolutely terrible name, one of the worst names out there. So, he built this company. This was during Patrick's first semester at MIT. When John was still at college, still at uh high school, they founded this company, which was a tool for eBay e eBay sellers to manage their inventory and track best-selling items and underperformers. It sold for $5 million, making John a millionaire before he even finished his A levels. So these guys are absolute geniuses from a small town, small village in Ireland and they birthed Stripe and have scaled it to a company worth $ 160 billion and it is just the darling of Silicon Valley and the darling of these great success stories and obviously a very very important company today. >> Yeah, I love that. And shout out to County Tipperary from where they're from. Well, I'm sure we got some listeners there. >> Oh, I hope we do. >> So, so talk to me about the the So, before we go into some other the mechanics, does the way of the business of Stripe? So, what does Stripe actually do? I think people just think quite vanilla when they think Stripe of just payments, but is there more to it than that? >> Yeah, absolutely. The way that I like to think about Stripe is how do you and I interact with Stripe on a day-to-day basis because it is one of those infrastructure the plumbing of payments and you don't necessarily see it but you definitely definitely use it. So this invisible infrastructure rears its head predominantly in things like online checkout. So any online shop or subscription service or app that uses a checkout page might have the powered by Stripe thing in small print at the bottom. It might have again here in the UK faster online checkout via link which is the company's saved card wallet. So you might see a pay with link as an option. And it also processes a lot of the Apple Pay and the Google Pay uh payments options. So I use Apple Pay all the time. A lot of that is getting rooted or wired through Stripe. And then increasingly it is the infrastructure for subscription and recurring billing. And this is where Stripe has really really exploded. This is the this is the exponential growth of the company. What Stripe does so well is it basically says we want we want to win you as a startup as you're very exciting. you're an e-commerce startup or you're a platform of some description or increasingly you're an AI startup and you're you've got uh subscription revenue coming in and then we want to win you again as a large business. So almost sees it as two sales processes. We get the companies when they're small and then we get them when they've got bigger because we are big enough to deal with the large companies. So again, as a infrastructure of the of of the payments of the online payments ecosystem, Stripe basically does everything. And it's definitely worth taking a look at their website and just looking at their product suite to a get totally overwhelmed because they do a lot of different things, but b to realize that their goal is to capture every single part of this entire ecosystem which involves the friction of capital online and the friction now of intelligence online. So I'm assuming then what you've described is their moat. their moat is that they are master of the universe so to speak and as a what as a dovetail of owning the volume you own the data that's produced from that interestingly when I was with these MS students earlier today uh I managed to talk about Argus you'll be proud so we were talking about Argus and I was kind of cycling them through the different departments within the bank and we got to technology and we were talking quants and stuff and we started talking about big data and I was trying to get them to think about well what are all the other big data thinking quite creatively that we could look at of where in a location you could do to try and anticipate the performance of sales at Argus. So, is it the similar sort of thing here? If you think with Stripe and they've just got millions of payments happening every single second of minute of the day, there must be such rich information. I can imagine hedge funds must pay these guys a lot of money. Yeah, that's a very very interesting point. Yeah, they definitely have an edge. They have a lead with regards to data analytics and they can probably wrap that up and do what they want with it from a monetization perspective. I think probably their stickiness, the kind of product moat, they their product's really good. It's more expensive than comparables, but it's better and users, companies, enterprise users love it. And once you've integrated Stripe into your ecosystem, into the nuts and bolts of your business, and you realize that Stripe works really well, then you are going to stick with it. And as I said, you win them as a startup. And by the way, if you've ever used Stripe, if anyone's ever used Stripe, it is dead simple to get started with Stripe if you want to launch an e-commerce company or whatever it might be. And then, well, as you get bigger, they can help you. So, it's just that stickiness. People that join with Stripe don't leave it. And that's the main moat. Is there any comparables then from Stripe's M&A strategy that would be akin to like a Facebook in a sense of it's the number one dominant player in its field and then it keeps very high like track of the emerging technologies and talent coming up and then just gobbles them up and then bolts them in. Yes, I think that's probably fair. So, Stripe's done 19 acquisitions over the last few years, only a few of which have been priced uh or been valued or been disclosed. Uh the biggest one before the Open Routter acquisition was the $ 1.1 billion acquisition of Metronome in December 2025. And actually, they released this letter to their shareholders discussing the logic of their last three acquisitions. And it says something like this. read the acquisitions as one stack and the logic stops being mysterious. Metronome counts the consumption. Open router decides where the consumption goes and at what price. Privy holds the wallet and then bridge and tempo settle. ACP handles the checkout when the agent is the buyer. They are vertically integrated, right? So maybe instead of it being a Facebook example, certainly with a WhatsApp and an Instagram and a Facebook, maybe think of it as a vertically integrated technology company more akin to maybe an Amazon that owns the cloud, that owns the software layer, that owns the analytics layer, etc. So these guys are vertically integrated to an extent horizontal horizontally dominant as well. And again, if what they are saying turns out to be true about the future of the economy and the future of the world, then they're going to be well positioned to take advantage of it. >> Just as you were explaining that, I was I was just thinking in my mind's eye, there'd be so many good infographics to explain what you just said. Then you've got the vertical integrated company, and I had my mind like the, you know, the BPs, the shells, what might what have you. And then you've got the AI side and then you've got this payment side. Such a great way of of thinking about it. >> Coming soon to a uh to a Ant Chung LinkedIn post near you. >> We'll see. We'll see how many tokens it will take me to uh create. >> All right. Well, look, the the final bits here were you said the word singularity and that set off probably my mind in the wrong direction. So, where should my mind have gone? >> Yeah. So, so Collison, I believe John said that we had reached singularity and they've put the singularity at January the 1st, 2026. When people think of singularity, they tend to think about, you know, autonomous robots taking over with uh with intelligence that is better than any humans across any number of different areas. and those agents are or those autonomous agents are self-improving, right? Basically, the machines have taken over. This is a little bit of a different definition of singularity. Um, and even in the letter they say it's a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that on January the 1st that marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis. And what they kind of mean to the singularity is effectively there's no ceiling to the global economy. They are evidencing the singularity through a sharp rise in new firm creation and basically the fact that they're doing really really well. It seems to me and and Gizmodo uh pointed out that well basically questioned quite rightly why a payments middleman gets to unilaterally declare the AI has surpassed human intelligence noting that the evidence was just elevated business formation stats which I kind of agree. basically things are really going very well in their business and AI is helping a lot of new businesses get created which is benefiting them that doesn't mean that we have hit some kind of nebulously defined singularity so I think they may be in over their skis and by the way if you're interested in these guys in the Collison brothers and in Stripe they do the very well listened to uh Cheeky Pint podcast where they talk a lot about I mean they're very intelligent Well, very intelligent people. So, um there's a lot of very intelligent stuff that goes on in that podcast, but yeah, Singularity. I'm not so sure. >> Well, there you go. This podcast show is in in collaboration with the Cheeky Pint. So, uh there we go. Just had a look. Patrick Collison is 37 years old. John Collison is 36 years old. I don't know about you, but as I kind of we do more and more of these episodes, I guess um this podcast is now into its like fourth year, the older I get, or is it the younger these people are getting in terms of creating these phenomenal companies. So, the two we've talked about so far, the Open Routter and these two brothers, literally in their mid-30s, just quite incredible. I like to think I the only way that I sleep well at night is believing that these all of these people are deeply deeply unhappy for some reason with no evidence to prove it. >> They go, "God damn it, a cursor guy outbid me on my Malibu beach house. How dare he?" >> Correct. Correct. >> Okay. Well, look, if you enjoyed that, uh, please do let us know. Drop us a comment. I think you can hype the show on YouTube these days. So, uh, give that a go. Let's see if we can push it out to as many people as possible. And I do know a large portion of you aren't subscribers. So, your first time listen, if you have made it to the end, make sure you do subscribe because we're going to have fresh episodes as always coming twice a week, top and tail, start and end with a more M&A focus or business case study focus, and then one reviewing the global market conditions of that week. All right, Stephen. Thank you as always. Thank you aunt.