Orrick and Cleary have landed roles advising AI startup OpenRouter on its acquisition by payments giant Stripe, repped by Fenwick & West.
Reuters and the Financial Times reported the cash-and-stock deal is worth around $8bn, making it Stripe's biggest buy to date.
Orrick's team is led out of California by technology and M&A partners Josh Pollick and Alexandra Wood. Last year they also advised OpenRouter on Series Seed and Series A financing rounds led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures that together raised $40m.
Meanwhile Cleary's effort is headed by M&A partners Benet O’Reilly and Charles Allen, who are based in California and New York respectively.
The deal comes as Stripe moves to position itself at the centre of the AI economy. New York-based OpenRouter is a marketplace that helps businesses route and optimise their usage of tokens, which track units of text or code processed by large language models.
A March report by Deloitte found that 61% of surveyed companies with annual revenue of at least $500m expected to consume more than 10 billion tokens per month by 2028 – roughly doubling consumption in two years.
OpenRouter said it currently processes more than 10 trillion tokens per day across more than 400 AI models and serves around 10 million developers and companies.
"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," Stripe CEO, Patrick Collison, said.
He added OpenRouter's acquisition would enable to Stripe to “help businesses maximise profitability by routing their requests intelligently and spending their tokens efficiently.”
The Fenwick team acting for Stripe is led by New York corporate partner Ken Myers and Victoria Lupu, a technology and M&A partner based in San Francisco. Myers has acted for Stripe in multiple deals in the past, including its buy of crypto-wallet startup Privy in 2025 and Metronome earlier this year, in a move that handed it a billing platform that lets companies charge their customers based on token usage rather than relying on a flat subscription.
In July Stripe, which was valued at $159bn in a tender offer earlier this year, also made a joint bid with private equity firm Advent International to acquire PayPal for more than $53bn.
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