OpenAI Acquires AI Personal Finance Startup Hiro Finance

OpenAI has acquired personal finance startup Hiro Finance, founder Ethan Bloch announced on Monday, and OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch. The acquisition marks OpenAI's foray into the personal finance space, with Hiro Finance bringing its AI-powered financial planning tool to the table. Hiro Finance was backed by prominent fintech VC firm Ribbit, as well as General Catalyst and Restive.

While terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, Hiro Finance will be shutting down its operations on April 20 and deleting all data from its servers on May 13, indicating an acquihire. According to Bloch, Hiro Finance employees will be joining OpenAI, although the exact number of employees is unclear. LinkedIn lists around 10 people associated with the company.

Bloch did not respond to a request for comment on the acquisition. Hiro Finance was founded in 2023 and launched its AI tool about five months ago. The app offered AI-powered financial planning for consumers, allowing users to input financial information such as salary, debts, and monthly costs, and modeling different what-if scenarios to help them make financial decisions.

The company's AI was specifically trained to excel in financial math, including an option to verify accuracy. This deal stands out for several reasons. Bloch previously founded Digit, a digital-only bank that helped people automatically save money, which was sold to Oportun in 2021 for over $200 million.

Additionally, this is not OpenAI's first foray into financial app acquisitions. Given that OpenAI markets ChatGPT as a valuable tool for business finance teams, it's likely that the company is looking to add more talent to this area. It's also possible that this acquihire is an effort to make OpenAI more popular with OpenClaw users, who often tend to prefer Claude.

OpenClaw is a popular agent for robo stock trading, and Bloch had created his own auto-trading OpenClaw agent named RoboBuffett. Bloch has a history of launching successful startups, having founded his first tech company at the age of 13. He told Business Insider that Hiro Finance was his 15th project, with the first 13 failing.

He sold his 14th project, Flowtown, a social media SaaS tool, for $4.5 million, and Digit for around $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.