Founded in 2010, Stripe provides APIs for cards, invoicing, and metered billing. Its August 19, 2026 investor letter said 88% of the Forbes AI 50 — including OpenAI and Anthropic — build on Stripe, as do 100% of a just-published Brex list of fastest-growing startups, and that AI-plus-crypto revenue was more than doubling year-over-year. The same letter announced OpenRouter would join Stripe as its largest-ever acquisition (expected to close in the coming weeks) and described an AI-economy stack of discovery (Stripe Projects, Directory, Provisioning API), usage metering (Metronome), payments (Bridge, Agentic Commerce Suite, Tempo, MPP), and fund storage (Privy, Open Standard). Stripe also claimed January 1, 2026 marked 'the beginning of the singularity' based on a rise in new firm creation — a framing explainx.ai covered as a definitional fight, not Vinge's superintelligence event horizon.