OpenAI Acquires Personal Finance AI Startup Hiro Finance in Apparent Acqui-Hire Deal

OpenAI has purchased personal fintech startup Hiro Finance, company founder Ethan Bloch announced Monday, and OpenAI confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch. The early-stage startup counted top-tier fintech venture capital firm Ribbit, alongside General Catalyst and Restive, among its institutional backers.

Neither side has disclosed financial terms of the deal, and Hiro never publicly shared how much total capital it raised during its operation. With Hiro set to shut down all standalone product operations on April 20 and delete all user data from its servers by May 13, the transaction is widely categorized as an acqui-hire—an acquisition focused on bringing on a startup’s team rather than retaining its existing product.

Bloch confirmed in his public announcement that Hiro employees will join him at OpenAI following the deal. He did not specify how many staff are making the move, but public LinkedIn profiles show roughly 10 people affiliated with the startup. Bloch declined to share any additional comment beyond his initial post.

Founded in 2024, Hiro launched its consumer AI tool roughly five months ago. The startup built AI-powered personalized financial planning tools for everyday users: customers input core financial details including salary, outstanding debt, and monthly recurring costs, and the tool generated models for a range of hypothetical financial scenarios to help users make more informed money decisions.

Bloch noted in early product demos that Hiro’s AI was purpose-built to nail complex financial math, and even included a feature that let users verify the tool’s output for accuracy. While cutting-edge frontier AI models have improved dramatically at all types of math over the past several years, consistent accuracy on technical financial calculations has historically been a weak spot for general-purpose models.

The deal stands out for two key reasons. First, Bloch is a seasoned fintech founder: he previously launched Digit, a popular neobank that helped users automate personal savings. Digit was acquired by Oportun in 2021 for a reported sum of more than $200 million.

Second, this is not the first financial technology acquisition OpenAI has completed. Since OpenAI already markets ChatGPT as a capable tool for business finance teams, the move to add specialized fintech talent to its roster lines up with the company’s existing strategy. It remains to be seen whether OpenAI will ultimately develop a dedicated standalone consumer financial planning product out of Hiro’s work.

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Industry observers also note the acqui-hire could be a strategic move for OpenAI to win over users of OpenClaw, a popular community-powered robo-stock trading agent platform where the majority of users currently prefer Anthropic’s Claude model over OpenAI’s offerings. Bloch himself built his own auto-trading OpenClaw agent named RoboBuffett, which he shared publicly on LinkedIn.

A quick look at Bloch’s career shows this is his 15th startup project, he told Business Insider. He launched his first venture as a 13-year-old entrepreneur, and his first 13 projects all failed. He sold his 14th project, Flowtown—a social media SaaS tool launched in 2009—for $4.5 million, and he says he sold Digit for roughly $230 million. Now he has sold his latest startup to OpenAI, a company that has already broken every record for user growth and fundraising, and is widely expected to set new records when it holds its eventual initial public offering.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated to correct two details: Hiro’s year of founding is 2024, and Bloch declined requests for additional comment.