The $7 Billion AI Middle Man: Stripe Buys OpenRouter

We discuss two major AI infrastructure moves: Stripe’s reported multibillion-dollar acquisition of OpenRouter, and Cursor’s launch of Origin as a GitHub alternative. 

We cover OpenRouter’s model aggregation and routing business, Stripe’s interest in AI payments and agentic microtransactions, and how the deal fits into the growing importance of the middle layer in AI. 

We also look at Origin’s focus on code hosting for AI agents and the broader shift toward infrastructure built for high-throughput automation.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Stripe Buys OpenRouter
6:22 Agentic Payments
7:27 Inference Becomes the Moat
9:05 Alex Atallah’s Exit
11:27 The Routing Wars
14:22 Cursor Challenges GitHub
20:29 Microsoft’s AI Problem
22:19 The New AI Stack

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Josh:
Just three months ago, investors valued OpenRouter at $1.3 billion.

Josh:
And this weekend, Stripe agreed to buy it for more than $7 billion.

Josh:
That's a five times markup in just 90 days for a company doing roughly $140 million in revenue.

Josh:
That's 50 times their revenue, which is outrageous when you look at what other

Josh:
companies in this industry are trading at.

Josh:
It seems like a top signal until you realize that Stripe processed $1.9 trillion

Josh:
of volume last year and only kept 0.36% of it.

Josh:
Open router charges five and a half percent on everything that flows through

Josh:
it. So Stripe just bought this take rate of 15 times higher than what it's used

Josh:
to in the fastest growing industry on earth.

Josh:
And this would seem like a one-off pattern if we didn't also get information

Josh:
from SpaceX, also known as Cursor, who just launched a GitHub competitor yesterday

Josh:
while the GitHub platform was down.

Josh:
In AI, the attention is kind of moving from the model layer to the middlemen.

Josh:
And we have some proof that we're going to walk through today going through

Josh:
this open router acquisition and the SpaceX alternative to GitHub.

Josh:
These are pretty big deals.

Ejaaz:
So the number one question, I think, if you're listening to this episode is

Ejaaz:
why on earth should I care? And why do I care about some TradFi Stripe finance

Ejaaz:
company buying this other random company that I don't really care about, right?

Ejaaz:
I only want to hear about Anthropic. I only want to hear about OpenAI.

Ejaaz:
Well, firstly, what is OpenRouter?

Ejaaz:
OpenRouter is basically a platform that you can go to and you pay one subscription,

Ejaaz:
you pay once and you get access to 400 plus AI models.

Ejaaz:
This could be open models, this could be closed models, like from Anthropic,

Ejaaz:
from OpenAI, but they could also be the Chinese LLM open source models.

Ejaaz:
And the idea behind Open Router is as follows.

Ejaaz:
If you are someone that has a task or a project or a business that you want to build, or

Ejaaz:
largely anything. You want to figure out the cheapest way to do it,

Ejaaz:
the most cost-efficient way to do it, but also using the smartest models when

Ejaaz:
and where it makes sense.

Ejaaz:
But that's sort of confusing. You would need to get manually many different

Ejaaz:
subscriptions. You would need to kind of know which model to use at which different time.

Ejaaz:
And then the models get upgraded and then you don't know which one to choose.

Ejaaz:
Like, are you using Grok? Am I using Cursor's model? Am I using ChatGPT?

Ejaaz:
Am I using Claude? I don't know.

Ejaaz:
OpenRatter basically solves all of that problem for you.

Ejaaz:
So a simple chat box in the same way that you would in chat GPT.

Ejaaz:
And it has a smart route on the back end that determines which model to use at which specific time.

Ejaaz:
And it saved people so much money. And it's given much better answers on average.

Ejaaz:
Now, you mentioned they're using or they're processing around 30 trillion tokens

Ejaaz:
a week at this point, 100 trillion tokens per month.

Ejaaz:
This is up, I think, 15x from last year, and it's up 5x or 6x in the last six

Ejaaz:
months alone. These guys are like absolutely churning out money,

Ejaaz:
$50 million ARR every single year.

Ejaaz:
And so the idea here is why would Stripe buy a company like this?

Ejaaz:
Well, the answer is pretty simple. When you look at what Stripe does,

Ejaaz:
they basically looked at the financial system.

Ejaaz:
They looked at banks. They looked at how people transact money.

Ejaaz:
And they thought, hmm, this is really clunky. This is really siloed.

Ejaaz:
We are going to build on top of this and make it a really smooth process to

Ejaaz:
create a transaction, to pay for something, to sell your goods or service.

Ejaaz:
They then looked at AI and they thought, huh, AI is going to eat our entire business up.

Ejaaz:
And these tokens, these AI tokens that people are like prompting and using,

Ejaaz:
look very similar to money.

Ejaaz:
And I see that OpenRouter has pretty much the same business model that we have.

Ejaaz:
How do we get access to this AI world? We should just buy OpenRouter.

Ejaaz:
And that's pretty much what they did.

Josh:
Even in their own words, their stated thesis is to be the economic infrastructure for AI.

Josh:
Traditionally, when you are an AI agent going to make payments,

Josh:
you are subject to the traditional rails of a human being, which is 30 cents

Josh:
and 2.9% fees. So anytime you want to pay online with a credit card,

Josh:
that's what you're paying when you pay through Stripe.

Josh:
It's a serious amount of money when it's done at the scale that they're dealing

Josh:
with, which is $3 trillion of money per year.

Josh:
So how do you get around that? You have to build this infrastructure layer.

Josh:
And when Stripe's building the infrastructure layer, you could view it as small

Josh:
different parts of it. So they have Bridge, it's stablecoin infrastructure,

Josh:
it's crypto, there's much lower fees.

Josh:
Then in June of 2025, they acquire Privy, which is a embedded wallet specific for agents.

Josh:
Then in September, they acquire Agentic Commerce, and they start to build this

Josh:
Agentic layer on top of it. Then they build their own blockchain in March 2026,

Josh:
and now they are making a bid for OpenRouter. And the number is not final.

Josh:
We believe it's $7 billion.

Josh:
No one has confirmed. Stripe hasn't wanted to come out and say this is the amount.

Josh:
It was rumored to be $10 billion.

Josh:
Now the current consensus is seven there's a chance it may have been eight but

Josh:
regardless it is a huge amount of money that they're paying for this

Josh:
and it seems to be like the next layer the next step in building this agentic

Josh:
infrastructure situation that they have because when you believe in the thesis

Josh:
that agents are going to get more capable that implies that the spending that

Josh:
they're going to be doing is much higher and not only is it much higher

Josh:
but it could be much smaller perhaps you're trying to pay for sub agents to use

Josh:
um to do this really complex project and you just need to pay a couple cents

Josh:
for server hours it doesn't make sense to do that with a credit card there's

Josh:
no infrastructure built in place yet to

Josh:
have these microtransactions that agents may want to use and also it's kind

Josh:
of clunky infrastructure for agents to send money in large quantities like when

Josh:
you think about sending a wire transfer an ach transfer sometimes it takes days

Josh:
sometimes you're limited in the amount you could send

Josh:
that doesn't really work for agents and you kind of want something separate

Josh:
for these ai entities so that feels like this is kind of what that is building towards but

Josh:
the difference is that open router is a different piece of the stack open router

Josh:
serves kind of like the meter it's

Josh:
the point where the intelligence gets consumed and gets priced so they've bought

Josh:
this middle layer that on the surface appears pretty lame it's like oh they

Josh:
just paid seven billion dollars for a wrapper but in reality

Josh:
they just got the middleware that

Josh:
Tends to soon i'm sure hundreds of trillions of tokens are going to get routed

Josh:
through and the amount of data that comes through that on top of everything

Josh:
is huge so this feels like they the reason they spent 50 times earnings they've

Josh:
made such a huge multiple on this company

Josh:
is for that reason alone it's for having the right to be the middle layer of

Josh:
this new infrastructure tidal wave that's happening as it relates to ai agents and tokens

Ejaaz:
I've been trying to wrap my head around the $7 billion price tag because it

Ejaaz:
just seems like they're overpaying massively for what is essentially a company

Ejaaz:
that makes $50 million a year. You don't typically pay like 120X earnings for something like that.

Ejaaz:
But as I start to unpack it in my head, I think there's a few things going on here.

Ejaaz:
Now, one of them you mentioned is agentic payments. I think Stripe is basically

Ejaaz:
making a big bet that the future of payments isn't gonna be human at all.

Ejaaz:
In fact, it'll probably be 10 to one agents to humans.

Ejaaz:
So what a world looks like in that sense is you're never selling to a human in the future.

Ejaaz:
You're selling mostly to AI agents. AI agents aren't going to have big wallets

Ejaaz:
or big budgets. They're going to be making microtransactions.

Ejaaz:
Now, right now, the financial system sucks for microtransactions.

Ejaaz:
If you go on to like Bloomberg, for example, right? And let's say I want to read an article.

Ejaaz:
I don't have a Bloomberg subscription right now, but I would love to read one

Ejaaz:
specific article. I would love to just pay five bucks to read that specific article.

Ejaaz:
I can't do that right now. And Bloomberg probably just wants to charge massive

Ejaaz:
subscription fees annual, right?

Ejaaz:
But they're not able to do that. With this new purchase, Stripe is one step

Ejaaz:
closer to be able to enable this. You mentioned they have their own blockchain.

Ejaaz:
This is kind of like a stablecoin thing. This is like digital money.

Ejaaz:
If you combine both of these things together, you suddenly unlock agentic payments.

Ejaaz:
And that is basically Stripe's main vision.

Ejaaz:
The second thing, and I think the real reason why they're paying $7 billion for Open Router.

Ejaaz:
Inference specifically. Now, inference is basically the cost or the ability

Ejaaz:
to serve customers requests or prompts for their AI model. So you route it to

Ejaaz:
an AI model, you get the answer back, and you serve it to them.

Ejaaz:
Now, inference over the last, I think, year and a half has basically 10 to 20x.

Ejaaz:
It's become a more valuable moat than training your own AI model.

Ejaaz:
And this has been the case for like all Frontier Labs as well.

Ejaaz:
They've realized that post-training is way more valuable.

Ejaaz:
So in a world where anyone and everyone is using AI for pretty much anything,

Ejaaz:
any conceivable kind of like task, you can expect to be able to have high volume

Ejaaz:
transactions. Like money basically just flows through this entire thing.

Ejaaz:
Everyone's doing every single bit of work through inference.

Ejaaz:
And Stripe wants to be the Rails that owns all of that. I was reading this really

Ejaaz:
interesting case study.

Ejaaz:
Josh, do you know where Visa came from or like how Visa came to be? Not a clue.

Josh:
It was in 1958.

Ejaaz:
They came out of Bank of America

Ejaaz:
They were a pet project inside Bank of America. They were incubated inside another bank.

Ejaaz:
And they built basically this network to make Bank of America more compatible

Ejaaz:
with other different banks, except no other bank wanted to use this thing because

Ejaaz:
it came from a competitor. So what did they do?

Ejaaz:
They spun out this thing called the Visa network, and it became super popular

Ejaaz:
because it was like a neutral platform.

Ejaaz:
And then everyone started using it, and Visa itself became a bank.

Ejaaz:
Now, we see the opposite thing happening here, where Stripe has basically acquired

Ejaaz:
open rights and so the question is allegedly if it's true will they keep it

Ejaaz:
separate to their current business or will they kind of keep it as like a neutral good.

Josh:
Yeah i don't know well you could you could tell bill ackman about that visa

Josh:
story i'm sure he'd be stoked that's a nod to yesterday's episode if you haven't

Josh:
watched go check it out i do have to ask you a question which is have you ever

Josh:
heard of openc like remember openc oh yeah

Ejaaz:
That one called back to you.

Josh:
For those that aren't familiar openc and we'll get to the reason why i'm mentioning

Josh:
this but openc was the largest nft marketplace in the world.

Josh:
And for those who were participating in the crypto space, if you ever bought

Josh:
an NFT, chances are it went through OpenSea. Now it had a meteoric rise and

Josh:
then unfortunate fall because, you know, the attention just kind of faded away from the space.

Josh:
But the reason why I mentioned that is because the founder of OpenSea is named

Josh:
Alex Atala, and he just so happens to also be the founder of OpenRouter,

Josh:
the company that just got acquired by Stripe.

Josh:
And we have his LinkedIn here open on screen and like, wow, what a run.

Ejaaz:
Dude, he was a forward deployed engineer before it was cool. Back in 2012.

Josh:
Between 2012 to 2014, which means he probably got equity and that equity is

Josh:
probably up a tremendous amount.

Josh:
Then he was lead front-end engineer, chief technology officer,

Josh:
and then co-founder of OpenSea

Josh:
for four years and seven months. And now co-founder and CEO of Open Router.

Josh:
So two multi-billion dollar businesses.

Josh:
And it's about time he got his exit because man, what a generational run he's been on.

Josh:
And if you are not familiar with Alex Atala, we actually had him on the show.

Josh:
We interviewed him on Limitless a while ago. This was back from, when did we do this?

Josh:
August 4th, 2025. So just over a year ago, we had Alex on.

Josh:
At that time, what was Open Router valued at? It must've been like what,

Josh:
one 10th or less of what it's valued that today?

Ejaaz:
I think it was a, I think it was max, like a hundred mil. I think he had just

Ejaaz:
raised, which is why we got him on.

Josh:
Oh my God. And, and even just in the last three months, why didn't we raise?

Ejaaz:
We should have invested.

Josh:
We need the limitless fund. Someone give us a limitless fund.

Josh:
That would have been our biggest exit to date with this guy,

Josh:
but that's the story of Alex Talos.

Josh:
So clearly this guy is a pretty focused founder. He's pretty cracked.

Josh:
He, this dude understands where the puck is going. I'm really curious to see

Josh:
what he builds next, but I found that to be a really interesting story.

Josh:
And not only is he following trends, but he has like some pretty interesting

Josh:
theses that are behind these companies.

Josh:
The one with OpenRound in particular is it's kind of, there's another plane

Josh:
analogy. I've been liking these plane analogies where nobody really holds loyalty

Josh:
accounts with 10 different airlines.

Josh:
You normally either have one or you search by the cheapest flight.

Josh:
So for me, I like flying Delta a lot. I have a Delta membership.

Josh:
If I'm not flying with Delta to increase my membership status or to really use their product suite,

Josh:
I will go to Google flights and I will buy the cheapest possible flight

Josh:
and that's all i want i just want to get from point a to point b open router

Josh:
serves as that layer open router is the company that will sift through 400 different ai models and

Josh:
ingest your query and tell you exactly where you can go to get the best outcome

Josh:
for the cheapest price and that was the thesis that

Josh:
really resonated and that's what

Josh:
worked so i mean congratulations to alex this is a pretty amazing exit

Josh:
uh by any means and to exit to stripe again who still is not public for some

Josh:
reason stripe seems to be like the last large company that needs to file their

Josh:
s1 hopefully we'll get that soon but pretty amazing run by by open router and

Josh:
the company and i'm like really stoked to see where stripe takes this next

Ejaaz:
I think it's also worth pointing out that open router isn't operating in like

Ejaaz:
a silo there are many other companies that are rumored to be building their

Ejaaz:
own routing platform look no further than open ai so open ai has a bunch of different models their

Ejaaz:
most recent model release has about like three different versions.

Ejaaz:
They have a routing feature that enables your prompt to go to the right model

Ejaaz:
at the right time for the cheapest possible way.

Ejaaz:
And then if you look at Meta, Zuck saw the rumors about open routing potentially

Ejaaz:
being acquired and launched a project codenamed, I believe it's Switchboard,

Ejaaz:
which aims to do the exact same things with Meta's own models,

Ejaaz:
as well as a bunch of new open hosted models.

Ejaaz:
And then if you look at the financial system itself, Ramp, which basically does

Ejaaz:
something similar to Stripe, processes a lot of transaction volume.

Ejaaz:
They created an internal routing platform that saved them, I think it was 40%

Ejaaz:
of their annual spend, not AI spend, but annual spend in general.

Ejaaz:
And they're now creating that or externalizing that as a product for anyone

Ejaaz:
to get access to. So we're seeing this growing trend of people realizing that

Ejaaz:
there's not just going to be one or two models that you're going to be using every single day.

Ejaaz:
You're going to be using multiple and you don't need to pick and choose which

Ejaaz:
ones. They're going to be hundreds.

Ejaaz:
So just get a routing or aggregator platform to do it.

Ejaaz:
And again, Alex Zatala has a history in building aggregator platforms.

Ejaaz:
OpenCU is exactly that for NFTs.

Josh:
You have to imagine that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are seeing this

Josh:
and they're thinking to themselves, well, hey, wait, we just have like a suite

Josh:
of models from high to low, very cheap ones, very high end ones.

Josh:
Why can't we create our router ourselves?

Josh:
So I imagine, like you just mentioned with Zuck, we're going to see a lot of

Josh:
that, mostly just due to the nature of agents and how these agents are working.

Josh:
Not all of them need frontier tokens.

Josh:
But for the once that do, we have a company for you. And it is called Ledger,

Josh:
the sponsor of this episode. Thank you, Ledger, for sponsoring this episode.

Josh:
If you are building with AI agents, chances are you're worried about security.

Josh:
There are break-ins all the time and increasingly happening.

Josh:
Ledger has a three-step process where the agent proposes, the humans approve,

Josh:
and then the Ledger signer enforces.

Josh:
It comes equipped with Ledger stack, which is an open source framework filled

Josh:
with tools that you could use to help you navigate the way that you use your

Josh:
agents. It works with Cloud Code, Codex, and Cursor. It is open source and available

Josh:
today, linked down in the description. Thank you to Ledger for sponsoring this part of the episode.

Josh:
Now, we did mention in the intro, I uttered the name of this company named SpaceX or Cursor.

Josh:
SpaceX just bought Cursor for $60 billion. And Cursor has been on this generational

Josh:
run so far where they released GrokBot, which was a Cursor product now under the SpaceX category.

Josh:
And just yesterday, something funny happened because GitHub was down.

Josh:
And for those of you who don't know, GitHub is basically where the world's code base is hosted.

Josh:
And there were a few hours during

Josh:
the day in which GitHub was having some outages. And during that time,

Josh:
Cursor the small little company that spacex acquired for 60 billion dollars

Josh:
the fastest growing company in the world um they released their own alternative

Josh:
called origin and origin is basically the github alternative now why are we

Josh:
talking about this now in this episode it's because the thesis is very similar

Josh:
to what we just talked about with the stripe acquisition a lot of the value is moving to

Josh:
being the middle layer the middle man you want to be the infrastructure provider

Josh:
for where all the tokens get generated so these companies aren't necessarily

Josh:
racing to generate the tokens, although in the case of SpaceX, they are.

Josh:
But instead, they're working towards this middle layer. And this cursor origin

Josh:
deployment is another example of how people just really want to be the tollbooths.

Josh:
They're building the place in which you have to pass in order to build with

Josh:
these AI agentic systems.

Ejaaz:
And the best part about this is you can get public exposure to this thing by

Ejaaz:
just buying one single stock, which happens to also own a rocket company as

Ejaaz:
well. SpaceX. Isn't that crazy? Yeah.

Ejaaz:
Unlike Stripe, unlike OpenRata, who are still private companies, SpaceX.

Ejaaz:
I still don't think a lot of people realize that they are very much so a frontier

Ejaaz:
AI lab. And the acquisition of

Ejaaz:
cursor will go down as one of the best acquisitions ever, in my opinion.

Ejaaz:
But yeah, like focusing on this, this particular launch, and why it's actually useful.

Ejaaz:
Code hosting platforms are used by pretty much any and every software engineer.

Ejaaz:
In the world. So basically allows you to upload your code repository and collaborate

Ejaaz:
across various different engineers to kind of update the code base,

Ejaaz:
submit kind of changes that you want to make.

Ejaaz:
And you can do so collaboratively online, securely, privately if you want, or publicly if needed.

Ejaaz:
And so GitHub had the moat on this entire thing. And Microsoft did the smart

Ejaaz:
thing years ago, and they acquired GitHub, except they didn't leverage that

Ejaaz:
at all for any of their AI products.

Ejaaz:
So now what Cursor slash SpaceX have is a fully integrated software stack where

Ejaaz:
they're building the models,

Ejaaz:
They now have the routing platform, which is basically Cursor for coding specifically.

Ejaaz:
And now they have the code hosting platform. So what does this mean?

Ejaaz:
Any future coding model that Elon Musk creates, so Grok Code,

Ejaaz:
Grok Build, will essentially have a really tightly integrated product loop.

Ejaaz:
And they'll be able to see what developers and engineers are building,

Ejaaz:
how they're behaving, and be able to iterate and build much better frontier

Ejaaz:
coding models, which makes me basically, I don't want to turn this into a SpaceX

Ejaaz:
ball episode, but it makes me incredibly bullish about the entire thing.

Ejaaz:
But the second really cool thing about this, which separates it from GitHub,

Ejaaz:
in my opinion, they've specifically engineered Origin, this new code hosting

Ejaaz:
platform, to be extremely high throughput.

Ejaaz:
And that's specifically not for humans, it's for agents.

Ejaaz:
So what I really like about this demo, I can't remember if it's this demo or

Ejaaz:
another demo I watched, they had about a couple, I think it was like 50 GitHub commits per second.

Ejaaz:
So they ended up having multiple agents. I think they had like 100 agents at

Ejaaz:
one point pushing commits to

Ejaaz:
this new cursor origin platform, which basically I think probably like 10x is

Ejaaz:
the speed or minimum 10x is the speed at which humans are able,

Ejaaz:
or the best engineers are able to push code.

Ejaaz:
So the point is they've engineered an entire platform around AI agents doing

Ejaaz:
the bulk of coding in the future.

Ejaaz:
So that means testing the code, reviewing the code, submitting the code,

Ejaaz:
making sure other agents can help review the set code.

Ejaaz:
And so humans at the end of the day will just kind of sit back and manage a

Ejaaz:
fleet of these agents as they code. GitHub currently isn't oriented to do that,

Ejaaz:
but this platform is, and I think that gives them a major advantage going forwards.

Josh:
Yeah, some of the launch claims, 296,000 clones per hour, 22 commits per second per repo.

Josh:
For those who don't know, that's just a tremendous amount of code being pushed. This is superhuman.

Josh:
This is not something that GitHub ever built itself for because it was never

Josh:
expected that humans would ever do something at a rate this fast.

Josh:
So this is basically, if you were to redesign GitHub from first principles in

Josh:
the year 2026, this is what you get. It's just a tremendous amount of throughput.

Josh:
And this is coming at a time in which GitHub is really stressed.

Josh:
We showed a chart on the show a few weeks ago that shows the amount of commits

Josh:
to GitHub going basically in a vertical line. It's a hockey stick.

Josh:
They've never dealt with this much volume before. And as a result,

Josh:
they're starting to deal with some issues.

Josh:
One of which was the outage that happened yesterday was a global outage for

Josh:
six hours and 42 minutes.

Josh:
That is a tremendous amount of time for a company that hosts the Globes code,

Josh:
which meant that a lot of people couldn't push or deploy.

Josh:
During that time, ironically, is when this launch video came out.

Josh:
And it's funny, you know, the timing was a little bit rushed because there's

Josh:
not even audio in the launch video.

Josh:
I saw this great post online that said like, if your video, if your launch video

Josh:
has audio behind it, you've shipped too late.

Josh:
They didn't even get to processing audio. They didn't even put a song behind

Josh:
it. They just shipped it. they said here we're live go try it out i have to

Josh:
i can't help but think about microsoft in this situation

Josh:
because Microsoft, we know they've been struggling. They've been having a tough

Josh:
time. They haven't been able to produce really anything of value in the world of AI.

Josh:
They have all this open AI IP. They haven't really done much with it.

Josh:
Their flagship product, I guess, is still co-pilot, which no one uses unless

Josh:
you are forced to through your employer.

Josh:
Now their crown jewel GitHub has a pretty serious contender in cursor,

Josh:
or I should say SpaceX AI, the one of the soon to be the largest AI company

Josh:
or one of the largest AI companies in the world. So when I think about Microsoft,

Josh:
I'm like, man, what do they have going for them?

Ejaaz:
Dude, don't worry. They've only been flat year to date. Yeah.

Ejaaz:
Wow. I mean, let's see it like, let's see on the day. On the day we're looking

Ejaaz:
at, yeah, okay. Seems to be unbothered.

Ejaaz:
I mean, they did have a breakthrough earnings, quarterly earnings recently,

Ejaaz:
which their cloud revenue basically went vertical.

Ejaaz:
But again, if you just end up becoming a cloud provider in a world where you

Ejaaz:
could have owned the AI or Frontier AI Model Lab, you've fumbled the bag drastically.

Josh:
What does the five-year look like on that oh

Ejaaz:
Don't even how they've been doing for that's a whole 65.

Josh:
Not great for five years being one of the leading ai companies like that's that's

Josh:
tough and like you mentioned it's

Josh:
it's like okay the company will continue to do great right they have the infrastructure

Josh:
they have uh microsoft azure they're huge cloud service provider it has incredible

Josh:
margins it's growing very fast everyone needs cloud everyone needs these access to compute

Josh:
but other than that like what what do they have are they going to become a cloud-infra provider?

Josh:
Is that the end state of Microsoft after all these years?

Ejaaz:
Well, there is a counterpoint to this, which is,

Ejaaz:
pretty much any company that isn't a tech company in literally any industry

Ejaaz:
uses Microsoft's suite of services.

Ejaaz:
I cannot tell you the number of business meetings I've been on over the last

Ejaaz:
six months that have been on Microsoft Teams, and it makes me cringe, but listen, it works.

Ejaaz:
And that just shows the deep embedding that their software infrastructure has

Ejaaz:
for the majority of companies in the world.

Ejaaz:
Now, that is a very sticky moat. Now, Anthropic, OpenAI are trying to chip away at their moat, right?

Ejaaz:
Saying, hey, use our models, we'll deploy, we'll give you forward deployed engineers

Ejaaz:
and try and figure out how best to integrate AI because they can't really get

Ejaaz:
into the client's computer systems other than that way.

Ejaaz:
Microsoft knows that they have this moat. Satya Nadella wrote this really long

Ejaaz:
essay basically saying, hey guys, I know that you're trying to get into our

Ejaaz:
data moat and we're going to do everything that we can to protect it,

Ejaaz:
but I don't see how they can.

Ejaaz:
They're going to have to eventually hand over the reins if they can't come up

Ejaaz:
with a competitive AI offering. Copilot right now is that premium offering.

Ejaaz:
And I don't like to call it a premium offering because it's not that at all.

Ejaaz:
It can't even do the basics of like a GLM 5.2 Chinese open source model.

Ejaaz:
So again, it's hard for me to try and figure out how Microsoft improves from

Ejaaz:
here, but they do have the time. They do have the data mode.

Ejaaz:
And as long as they protect that, they have a shot. They have the cash balance. So we'll see.

Josh:
We'll see. We'll see what happens with all of these as the thesis play out.

Josh:
I mean, we have now it's clear like that there There is a shift upon us where

Josh:
the last two years were very much focused on like who was able to build the

Josh:
smartest model, all of the values occurring to that.

Josh:
Now people are looking further out that risk curve. Like where is next?

Josh:
We know that infrastructure is one of them building data centers,

Josh:
but we also know that the middle men, that middle infralayer is like a pretty good place to be.

Josh:
Stripe purchased the toll booth. We have cursor. I guess you could imagine as

Josh:
if they're like paving these new highways and the labs who are the ones who

Josh:
are actually building intelligence.

Josh:
So it's becoming more clear. Everyone's starting to learn their role in this

Josh:
stack and they're accelerating because not one company is able to do it all just yet.

Josh:
So that's where we stand on Stripe and on Cursor. And I think these are two

Josh:
really cool, really impressive exits on the Stripe front with OpenRouter.

Josh:
Like, congratulations, what an exit. We're going to see how that plays off.

Josh:
Clearly, they're very bullish if they had $7 billion to spend.

Josh:
And like, man, I hope one day Stripe decides to go public. They feel like the

Josh:
final one to publish in S1. So hopefully we'll get that soon.

Ejaaz:
I would love to own part of the number one AI finance lab.

Ejaaz:
And Stripe has all the potential to do that. Maybe some of these funds do.

Ejaaz:
Maybe Leopold launches one in the future. God knows. Yeah, I would love to get

Ejaaz:
access to different sectors that aren't just generalized LLMs.

Ejaaz:
And I think finance is a big one. And Stripe's acquisition is huge. So I'm not.

Josh:
Going to say how that works. And Stripe has just like this unbelievable team

Josh:
of builders who are just so talented and so good at what they do.

Josh:
And if I were to place a bet on anyone actually winning this next frontier of

Josh:
finance and what that looks like, I would certainly pick Stripe.

Josh:
So very bullish on the future of Stripe as it relates to the future of payments.

Josh:
And I think they're a company to look out for.

Josh:
Open routers just fuel on the fire. and that is the update so thank you all

Josh:
so much for watching if you made it to the end you are a real one we appreciate

Josh:
you sticking along for the journey if you enjoy this episode don't forget to share it with a friend

Josh:
that's how we grow which we've been doing so fast and the comments have been

Josh:
so sweet so thank you to everyone who has left

Josh:
a nice comment we read pretty much all of them i i wake up in the morning and

Josh:
like the kind of scroll first thing and just see all of the nice and sometimes

Josh:
not so nice things but i appreciate the feedback both ways it's important to keep us humble

Josh:
um he does any final parting thoughts before we head out of here

Ejaaz:
Uh no i think that's pretty much it. I'm curious what people's thoughts are

Ejaaz:
on an episode like this. Is this something that's interesting?

Ejaaz:
Is this something that's just boring for you? Do you want to just hear about

Ejaaz:
model updates in general?

Ejaaz:
Or is talking about different sectors and applications of AI in different sectors

Ejaaz:
useful to you? Let us know in the comments, DM us, we're available on X,

Ejaaz:
share this with a friend.

Ejaaz:
And yeah, wherever you're listening to us, if you aren't subscribed,

Ejaaz:
if you haven't given us a rating, please do so. It helps us out massively.

Ejaaz:
And we will see you on the next one.