OpenAI has bought AI personal finance startup Hiro

OpenAI has acquired personal finance startup Hiro Finance founder Ethan Bloch announced on Monday and OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch. The startup was backed by A-list fintech VC firm Ribbit, as well as General Catalyst and Restive.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, nor did Hiro ever reveal how much money it raised. Since Hiro has said it will cease operations on April 20 and delete all data from its servers on May 13, we’re calling this an acquisition.

Bloch said in his post that Hiro employees are coming with him to OpenAI. He did not reveal how many employees were involved, but LinkedIn lists about ten people associated with the company. Bloch did not respond to our request for comment.

The company was founded in 2023 and launched its AI tool about five months ago. Hiro offered consumers financial planning based on AI. Users entered financial information such as salary, debt and monthly expenses, and the app modeled different what-if scenarios to help them make financial decisions.

Hiro is specifically trained to master financial math, including an option that allows users to verify accuracy, said Bloch in a demo of the product. Over the past few years, state-of-the-art frontier models have become significantly better (even good) at all kinds of mathematics. But historically they haven’t been.

This deal stands out for a number of reasons. Bloch previously founded Digit, a digital-only bank that helps people save money automatically. Digit was sold to Oportun in 2021 for more than 200,000 euros $200 millionsaid Oportun.

Furthermore, this isn’t the first financial app that OpenAI has acquired. Since OpenAI markets ChatGPT as a good tool for business finance teamswe can understand why the model maker would want to add more talent to this side of the house. Whether OpenAI plans to pursue financial planning as a more specialized app, we’ll have to wait and see.

It’s also possible that this acquisition is an attempt to make OpenAI more popular with OpenClaw users, who often prefer Claude. OpenClaw is a popular agent for robo stock trading. In fact, Bloch created his own OpenClaw auto-trading agent, which he called RoboBuffett, he said on LinkedIn.

Another fun fact: Bloch told According to Business Insider, Hiro was the fifteenth project he launched after starting out as a tech entrepreneur at the age of thirteen. The first 13 failed, he said. He sold No. 14, Flowtown, a SaaS social media tool launched in 2009, for $4.5 million. Bloch said he sold Digit for about $230 million. Now he has sold his latest startup to OpenAI, a company that has broken records for growth and fundraising, and may yet break records with an IPO.