Ramp's the underdog when it comes to LLM routing, but their story makes much more sense than Stripe's.
The leaked Stripe memo talks about OpenRouter as an entry into "intelligence pipelines," parallel to its "revenue pipeline" products.
That obfuscates the basic fact: Token routing (what they call the intelligence pipeline) is about saving money—if it wasn't you would always route to Fable—while Stripe's revenue pipelines are about, well, making money. One's money out, the other money in.
Stripe is just not where teams go to understand how much they're spending. That's pretty squarely Ramp territory, and I think Stripe is swimming against the current with the OpenRouter acquisition.
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