OpenAI has acquired personal finance startup Hiro Finance, founded by Ethan Bloch was 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.
Terms of the takeover were not disclosed, nor did Hiro ever reveal how much money it raised. Since Hiro said it will shut down operations on April 20th and delete all data from its servers on May 13th, we’ll call it an acquisition.
Bloch said in his post that Hiro employees are joining him at OpenAI. He did not specify how many employees that entails, but LinkedIn lists about 10 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 financial planning with artificial intelligence for consumers. 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 was specifically trained in financial mathematics, including an option that allowed users to verify accuracy, Bloch said in a demo of the product. In the last couple of years, state-of-the-art frontier models have gotten significantly better (even good) at mathematics of all kinds. But historically, it wasn’t.
This deal stands out for a few reasons. Bloch previously founded Digit, a digital-only bank that helped people save money automatically. Digit was sold to Oportun in 2021 for more than 200 million dollarsaccording to Oportun.
Additionally, this is not the first financial app that OpenAI has purchased. Since OpenAI markets ChatGPT as a good tool for business finance groupswe can see why the model maker would want to add more flair to this side of the house. Whether OpenAI plans to pursue financial planning as a more specialized application, we’ll have to wait and see.
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It’s also possible that this acquisition is an attempt to make OpenAI more popular with OpenClaw users, who often tend to prefer Claude. OpenClaw is a popular broker for robo trading. In fact, Bloch created his own Auto-trading OpenClaw agent that he called RoboBuffett, he said. on LinkedIn.
Another fun fact: Bloch he said Business Insider that Hiro was the 15th project he started, having started as a tech entrepreneur when he was 13 years old. The first 13 failed, he said. It sold No. 14, Flowtown, a SaaS social networking tool launched in 2009, for $4.5 million. Bloch said he sold Digit for about $230 million. Now he’s sold his latest startup to OpenAI, a company that has broken growth and fundraising records, and may yet break records with an IPO.
