OpenSea founder pivoted to AI — and won
OpenSea, once one of the most prominent companies in the cryptocurrency industry, has slowly been bleeding users and relevancy over the past four years.
The site went from leading the charge during the NFT (non-fungible token) hype train, seeing over $2.7 billion in volume in a single day in May of 2022, to dwindling to what’s likely to be less than $20 million in turnover for the entire month of August this year.
But two years ago, the founder of OpenSea, Alex Atallah, made a pivot to artificial intelligence by starting a company called OpenRouter – and this week it paid off.
The Death of NFTs and the rise of AI
It may be hard to believe now, but after raising $300 million from the likes of Paradigm and a16z in a Series C round, OpenSea was valued at an astounding $13.3 billion.
That valuation ran into reality, as the NFT boom quickly became a bust, and ten months later, with the collapse of FTX and cryptocurrencies in general, visitors and traders to the site fell off a cliff.
Read more: Former OpenSea manager’s insider trading conviction overturned
OpenSea has never returned to its previous heights since the 2022-2023 cryptocurrency winter, even as Bitcoin reached new highs in 2024 and 2025.
And with that stagnation, Alex Atallah, co-founder of OpenSea, decided to create a new venture, a unified API for developers to access multiple LLMs at once that he called OpenRouter.
New venture, new valuation, but this time a sale
Perhaps learning from harsh lessons of the past, it was reported by Bloomberg this past week that Stripe had purchased OpenRouter for over $7 billion.
While the valuation of this exit still pales in comparison to the astronomical $13.3 billion valuation of OpenSea – a valuation unchanged since 2022, as it has not done another raise – Atallah was able to find an exit for his firm.
Meanwhile, OpenSea continues to languish. It’s unclear if Atallah will utilize his recent windfall to put money back into OpenSea or if he’s simply moved on to green pastures altogether.
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