OpenAI acquired personal finance startup Hiro Finance, its founder Ethan Bloch announcement Monday and OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch. The startup was backed by leading fintech venture capital firm Ribbit, as well as General Catalyst and Restive.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and Hiro never revealed the amount of money raised. Since Hiro announced that it would shut down operations on April 20 and delete all data from its servers on May 13, we’ll call it an acquisition.
Bloch said in his post that Hiro’s employees would accompany him to OpenAI. He didn’t say how many employees that involves, 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 brought AI-based financial planning to consumers. Users entered financial information such as salary, debts, and monthly costs, and the app modeled different what-if scenarios to help them make financial decisions.
Hiro has been specially trained to master financial math, including an option for users to check for accuracy, Bloch said in a product demo. Over the past couple of years, state-of-the-art frontier models have gotten significantly better (if not good) at mathematics of all kinds. But historically, they haven’t been.
This deal stands out for several 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 dollarsaccording to Oportun.
Additionally, this is not the first financial application purchased by OpenAI. Since OpenAI markets ChatGPT as a good tool for corporate finance teamswe understand why the modeler would look to add more talent on this side of the house. If 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 effort to make OpenAI more popular with OpenClaw users, who often tend to prefer Claude. OpenClaw is a popular agent for robotic stock trading. In fact, Bloch created his own OpenClaw auto-trading agent that he named RoboBuffett, he said. is LinkedIn.
Another amusing anecdote: Bloch said Business Insider reported that Hiro was the 15th project he had launched, having started as a tech entrepreneur at the age of 13. The first 13 failed, he said. He sold number 14, Flowtown, a social media SaaS tool launched in 2009, for $4.5 million. Bloch said he sold Digit for about $230 million. He has now sold his latest startup to OpenAI, a company that has broken growth and fundraising records, and could break records again with an IPO.