This week in AI-native companies #5: Stripe buys the meter

Stripe acquired OpenRouter, a gateway managing requests across 400+ AI models, for over $7 billion, highlighting the growing importance of metering AI usage in payments infrastructure. Concurrently, the open-source Paperclip project is advancing governance features to manage AI agent approvals and company-wide access controls. xAI's Grok Bot launched on Amazon Bedrock with a large context window but without governance features, while Lindy's Slack AI teammate also debuted recently.