I've seen a lot of comments here and elsewhere about why is a proxy worth $8b. It is a bit more than a proxy.

It is a known brand for model routing and it has developed means to route model on their own and 3rd-party infrastructure at scale and without much issues.

Why Stripe? Who knows. I don't see much synergy but why not? If anything it is a way for Stripe to get into the market with agentic payments which may come to be worth a lot more than $7B.