Cleary Gottlieb, Orrick and Fenwick & West have taken the lead roles on the latest multibillion-dollar tech deal, as Stripe has agreed to acquire AI startup OpenRouter.
Cleary advised OpenRouter, with a team comprised of tax partner Swift Edgar and M&A partner Charles Allen in New York, and M&A partner Benet O’Reilly in California.
Orrick served as co-counsel to OpenRouter, with a team led by tech M&A partner and board member Josh Pollick, who founded the firm’s Santa Monica office, and tech and life sciences partner Alexandra Wood, who splits her time between the firm’s Austin and San Francisco offices.
Pollick and Wood led the team that advised OpenRouter on its $40m Series Seed and Series A combined financing round last year, while Pollick has also previously worked with Stripe, advising it on Series A-F financings worth a total $1bn.
Fenwick acted for Stripe on the acquisition, reportedly valued at more than $7bn, with M&A practice co-lead Ken Myers in New York and M&A partner Victoria Lupu in Silicon Valley advising.
The team also included tech transactions partners Joseph Schenck and Julia Arruda Rosenthal, executive compensation and employee benefits partners Nancy Chen and Matthew Cantor, privacy and cybersecurity partner Ana Razmazma, antitrust partner Tom Ensign, trade and national security partner Robert Slack, and tax partner William Skinner.
The California-headquartered firm has previously advised Stripe on a number of transactions, including its acquisition of metering and data mediation software developer Metronome earlier this year, and its acquisition of crypto wallet provider Privy last summer. Myers and Lupu led the firm’s team on both deals.
In a statement, Stripe said that its acquisition of OpenRouter, which provides a platform that allows businesses to switch between a wide variety of AI models, would help increase the profitability of businesses using the platform.
‘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,’ said Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison.
He continued: ‘Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI, and together with OpenRouter we’ll help businesses maximize profitability by routing their requests intelligently and spending their tokens efficiently.’
