OpenAI Acquires Financial Startup Hiro Finance

OpenAI has acquired the personal finance startup Hiro Finance, as announced by founder Ethan Bloch on Monday, with confirmation from TechCrunch. The startup was backed by prominent fintech venture capital firms Ribbit, General Catalyst, and Restive. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, nor did Hiro ever reveal how much funding it raised. Hiro stated it would shut down operations on April 20 and delete all data from its servers by May 13, which suggests this deal can be seen as an acquihire. Bloch mentioned that Hiro employees would be joining him at OpenAI, though he did not specify how many would be involved; LinkedIn lists around 10 people associated with the company.

The company was founded in 2023 and launched its AI tool about five months ago. Hiro provided AI-powered financial planning services for consumers. Users entered financial data such as salary, debts, and monthly expenses, and the app modeled various what-if scenarios to assist them in making financial decisions. Hiro was specifically trained to excel in financial calculations, including a feature that allowed users to verify accuracy, as Bloch demonstrated in the product showcase.

Over the past couple of years, cutting-edge models have significantly improved their mathematical capabilities, although historically, they have not always performed well in this area. 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 over $200 million. Additionally, this is not the first financial app OpenAI has acquired. Given that OpenAI markets ChatGPT as a useful tool for business finance teams, it is understandable why the company would seek to add more talent in this sector.

Whether OpenAI plans to develop financial planning as a more specialized application remains to be seen. This acquihire may also be an effort to make OpenAI more appealing to OpenClaw users, who often prefer Claude. OpenClaw is a popular agent for robo stock trading. In fact, Bloch created his own auto-trading OpenClaw agent named RoboBuffett, as he shared on LinkedIn.

Interestingly, Bloch told Business Insider that Hiro was the 15th project he launched, having started as a tech entrepreneur at the age of 13. He stated that the first 13 failed, but he sold the 14th, Flowtown, a social media SaaS tool launched in 2009, for $4.5 million. Bloch also mentioned that 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.