OpenSea founder pivoted to AI — and won
OpenSea, as soon as one of the outstanding corporations within the cryptocurrency trade, has slowly been bleeding customers and relevancy over the previous 4 years.
The positioning went from main the cost through the $NFT (non-fungible token) hype practice, seeing over $2.7 billion in quantity in a single day in Could of 2022, to dwindling to what’s prone to be lower than $20 million in turnover for the complete month of August this yr.
However two years in the past, the founding father of OpenSea, Alex Atallah, made a pivot to synthetic intelligence by beginning an organization known as OpenRouter – and this week it paid off.
The Loss of life of NFTs and the rise of AI
It could be arduous to consider now, however after elevating $300 million from the likes of Paradigm and a16z in a Sequence C spherical, OpenSea was valued at an astounding $13.3 billion.
That valuation bumped into actuality, because the $NFT growth rapidly turned a bust, and ten months later, with the collapse of FTX and cryptocurrencies typically, guests and merchants to the location fell off a cliff.
OpenSea goes multichain after 98% drop in quantity
OpenSea has by no means returned to its earlier heights because the 2022-2023 cryptocurrency winter, whilst Bitcoin reached new highs in 2024 and 2025.
And with that stagnation, Alex Atallah, co-founder of OpenSea, determined to create a brand new enterprise, a unified API for builders to entry a number of LLMs without delay that he known as OpenRouter.
New enterprise, new valuation, however this time a sale
Maybe studying from harsh classes of the previous, it was reported by Bloomberg this previous week that Stripe had bought OpenRouter for over $7 billion.
Whereas the valuation of this exit nonetheless pales compared to the astronomical $13.3 billion valuation of OpenSea – a valuation unchanged since 2022, because it has not performed one other increase – Atallah was capable of finding an exit for his agency.
In the meantime, OpenSea continues to languish. It’s unclear if Atallah will make the most of his current windfall to place a reimbursement into OpenSea or if he’s merely moved on to inexperienced pastures altogether.
