OpenAI Acquires AI Personal Finance Startup Hiro

OpenAI has acquired the personal finance startup Hiro Finance, founder Ethan Bloch announced on Monday, with OpenAI confirming the deal to TechCrunch. The startup was backed by top fintech venture capital firm Ribbit, along with General Catalyst and Restive.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and Hiro never revealed how much it had raised. Given that Hiro announced it will shut down operations on April 20 and delete all data from its servers by May 13, this appears to be an acquihire.

Bloch stated in his post that Hiro employees will join him at OpenAI. He did not specify how many, but LinkedIn shows around 10 people associated with the company. Bloch did not respond to our request for comment.

Hiro was founded in 2023 and launched its AI tool roughly five months ago. It provided AI-powered financial planning for consumers. Users input financial details such as salary, debts, and monthly expenses, and the app modeled various what-if scenarios to assist with financial decisions.

In a product demo, Bloch explained that Hiro was specifically trained to excel at financial math, including a feature enabling users to verify accuracy. Over the past few years, state-of-the-art frontier models have become significantly better—even good—at all kinds of math. Historically, however, they were not.

This acquisition stands out for a couple of reasons. Bloch previously founded Digit, a digital-only bank that helped users automatically save money. According to Oportun, Digit was sold to them in 2021 for over $200 million.

Moreover, this is not the first financial app OpenAI has acquired. Given that OpenAI markets ChatGPT as a useful tool for business finance teams, it's understandable why the company would seek to bring in more talent in this area. Whether OpenAI intends to develop financial planning into a more specialized application remains to be seen.

Another possibility is that this acquihire aims to make OpenAI more appealing to OpenClaw users, who often favor Claude. OpenClaw is a popular agent for automated stock trading. In fact, Bloch mentioned on LinkedIn that he created his own auto-trading OpenClaw agent named RoboBuffett.

Another interesting tidbit: Bloch told Business Insider that Hiro was the 15th project he started, having begun his career as a tech entrepreneur at age 13. He said the first 13 failed. He sold his 14th venture, Flowtown—a social media SaaS tool launched in 2009—for $4.5 million. Bloch mentioned selling Digit for roughly $230 million. Now, he has sold his latest startup to OpenAI, a company that has shattered records for growth and fundraising and may set new ones with an IPO.