OpenAI has acquired personal finance startup Hiro Finance, as confirmed by founder Ethan Bloch and OpenAI to TechCrunch. Hiro was backed by prominent fintech VC firm Ribbit, along with General Catalyst and Restive.
While the terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, Hiro announced it would be shutting down operations on April 20 and deleting all server data by May 13, indicating an "acqui-hire" where the primary goal is talent acquisition.
Bloch stated that Hiro employees will be joining him at OpenAI. Although the exact number wasn't specified, LinkedIn indicates approximately 10 individuals were associated with the company.
Founded in 2024, Hiro launched its AI tool about five months ago, offering AI-powered financial planning to consumers. Users could input financial information such as salary, debts, and monthly costs, and the app would model various "what-if" scenarios to aid in financial decision-making.
According to Bloch, Hiro was specifically trained to accurately handle financial math, including an option for users to verify its precision. This highlights the significant improvements in the mathematical capabilities of state-of-the-art frontier models over recent years.
This deal is notable for several reasons. Bloch previously founded Digit, a neobank focused on automatic savings, which was sold to Oportun in 2021 for over $200 million. Furthermore, this isn't OpenAI's first foray into financial applications. Given that OpenAI already positions ChatGPT as a valuable tool for business finance teams, this acquisition underscores its strategic intent to expand its talent pool in this domain. It remains to be seen if OpenAI plans to pursue financial planning through more specialized applications.
It's also plausible that this acqui-hire aims to increase OpenAI's appeal among OpenClaw users, who often prefer other AI agents like Claude. OpenClaw is a popular agent for robo stock trading; in fact, Bloch himself created an autotrading OpenClaw agent called RoboBuffett.
Bloch's entrepreneurial journey is also remarkable. He shared with Business Insider that Hiro was his 15th project, having started as a tech entrepreneur at age 13. He mentioned that his first 13 ventures failed. He later sold Flowtown, a social media SaaS tool launched in 2009, for $4.5 million, and Digit for approximately $230 million. Now, he has sold his latest startup to OpenAI, a company that has achieved record-breaking growth and fundraising, and is poised for a potentially record-breaking IPO.