OpenAI acquires Hiro Finance, signaling push into AI-powered financial planning for consumers

OpenAI has bought AI personal finance startup Hiro | TechCrunch

OpenAI has acquired personal finance startup Hiro Finance, founder Ethan Bloch 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 acquisition were not disclosed, nor did Hiro ever disclose how much money it raised. Since Hiro said it will be shutting down its operations on April 20 and deleting all data from its servers on May 13, we're going to call this an acquihire. Bloch said in his post that Hiro employees are coming with him to OpenAI. He didn't 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 launched its AI tool about five months ago. Hiro offered AI-powered financial planning for consumers. Users entered financial information like salary, debts, and monthly costs and the app modeled different what-if scenarios to help them make financial decisions. Hiro was specifically trained to nail financial math, including an option that allowed users to verify accuracy, Bloch said in a demo of the product. Over the past couple of years, state-of-the-art frontier models have gotten significantly better (even good) at math of all kinds. But historically, they haven't been. This deal stands out for a couple of reasons. Bloch previously founded neobank Digit, which helped people automatically save money. Digit was sold to Oportun in 2021 for, it said, more than $200 million. Plus, this isn't the first financial app OpenAI has bought. Given that OpenAI markets ChatGPT as a good tool for business finance teams, we can see why the model maker would be looking to add more talent to this side of the house. Whether OpenAI plans to pursue financial planning as a more specialized app, we'll have to wait and see. 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. In fact, Bloch created his own autotrading OpenClaw agent that he named RoboBuffett, he said on LinkedIn. Another fun fact: Bloch told Business Insider that Hiro was the 15th project he launched, having started as a tech entrepreneur when he was a 13-year-old. The first 13 failed, he said. He sold No. 14, Flowtown, a social media SaaS 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's broken all records for growth, raising money, and will potentially will break records for an IPO.

OpenAI acquires Hiro, an AI personal finance startup

Hiro is shutting down on 20 April and deleting all user data by 13 May. Founder Ethan Bloch previously sold Digit to Oportun for more than $200M. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. OpenAI, the San Francisco AI lab behind ChatGPT, has acquired Hiro Finance, an AI-powered personal finance planning startup, with founder Ethan Bloch and his staff moving to OpenAI. Bloch announced the deal on LinkedIn and OpenAI confirmed it. Terms were not disclosed, nor did Hiro ever publicly disclose how much it had raised. Hiro had approximately ten employees, all of whom are joining OpenAI. Bloch did not respond to a request for further comment. Hiro was founded in 2023 and launched its AI tool roughly five months ago. The app offered AI-powered financial planning for consumers: users entered information about their salary, debts, and monthly costs, and the platform modelled different what-if scenarios to support financial decision-making. A notable design choice was a verification option that allowed users to check the accuracy of the AI's financial maths, a deliberate feature at a time when large language models had a documented weakness with numerical reasoning. The startup was backed by Ribbit Capital, General Catalyst, and Restive. Bloch is a serial entrepreneur with a consistent track record in fintech and consumer software. He sold Flowtown, a social media SaaS tool launched in 2009, for $5 million. He subsequently founded Digit, a digital-only bank designed to automate saving for consumers, which was acquired by Oportun in 2021 for more than 00 million. He has described Hiro as his fifteenth project, having started building products as a 13-year-old, with the first thirteen failing. This acquisition is his third exit. This is not OpenAI's first acquisition in the financial services space, and the company already markets ChatGPT as a tool for business finance teams. The Hiro deal adds focused talent in consumer financial planning, a category where specialised AI reasoning around budgets, debt paydown sequencing, and savings optimisation requires a different product approach than general-purpose chat.

OpenAI acquires AI financial planning startup Hiro Finance - SiliconANGLE

OpenAI acquires AI financial planning startup Hiro Finance OpenAI Group PBC has acquired Hiro Finance Inc., a low-profile startup with an artificial intelligence tool for creating financial plans. Hiro announced the deal on Monday without disclosing its financial terms. The company raised an unspecified amount of funding from Ribbit, General Catalyst and Restive prior to the acquisition. Hiro's service speeds up the task of creating financial plans, documents that describe an individual's financial goals and how they can be achieved. The software uses a chatbot to collect information about the user's income, recurring expenses and investment portfolio. Hiro then turns those data points into a financial plan that it visualizes as a business intelligence dashboard. Users can have the chatbot create multiple versions of a financial plan. For example, an investor could create one version that assumes the value of a certain asset will increase by 5% per year and another that assumes a return of 7%. Hiro says that its AI can save hours of work by removing the need for manual calculations. The platform includes capabilities that enable users to verify its AI-generated calculations. According to Hiro, one of these features is a spreadsheet view that displays all the data points the software used to generate a financial plan. The company's approximately 10-strong team will reportedly join OpenAI following the acquisition. Hiro plans to discontinue its service on April 20 and delete users' data on May 15. According to a memo on the company's website, it's unclear whether OpenAI will bring the service's AI financial planning features to ChatGPT. Last month, OpenAI executive Fidji Simo reportedly told employees that the company is redirecting resources from "side quests" to enterprise offerings. As a result, launching a consumer-focused financial planning tool like Hiro might not be the ChatGPT developer's first priority. A more likely scenario is that the company will use Hiro's financial know-how and technology assets to enhance its growing lineup of tools for investment professionals. The acquisition comes a few weeks after OpenAI released a ChatGPT plugin for Excel. According to the company, financial analysts can use it to summarize complex spreadsheets created by colleagues. The plugin can also generate new spreadsheets for tasks such as developing corporate budgets and tracking product inventory levels. The Excel extension rolled out alongside a set of new connectors for ChatGPT. They enable financial professionals to pull data from sources such as S&P Global and FactSet into the chatbot. The acquisition of Hiro could help OpenAI make its financial features more competitive with those offered by Anthropic PBC. Like ChatGPT, Claude provides connectors for popular financial data sources. Last year, Anthropic debuted a version of the chatbot with higher usage limits that is specifically geared towards financial professionals.

OpenAI Buys Personal Finance Platform Hiro | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The deal will see Hiro's team join OpenAI, founder Ethan Bloch said in a LinkedIn post Monday (April 13). Bloch said the deal provides the opportunity to expand Hiro's vision of creating an "AI personal CFO." "For decades, personalized financial guidance has been too expensive, too generic or too hard to access. ChatGPT is finally changing that," Bloch wrote. "The mission that brought us to Hiro, and to Digit before that, has not changed: improving people's financial well-being. If anything, it feels even more important now." Terms of the deal were not released. The company's LinkedIn profile says it has under 50 employees. Founded in 2023, Hiro's tool allowed users to plan their finances by gaming out various scenarios according to their income, debt and spending patterns. Before Hiro, Bloch founded the aforementioned Digit, a neobanking platform which provided personalized savings, investing and banking tools. That company was acquired by FinTech Oportun in 2021 for $211 million. Bloch said Hiro would begin shutting down operations April 20, and would erase all data from its servers on May 13. Customers can export their data prior to the shutdown. The acquisition follows OpenAI's purchase last year of personal finance app Roi, with that company's co-founder and CEO joining the ChatGPT maker. "We started Roi 3 years ago to make investing accessible to everyone by building the most personalized financial experience," Sujith Vishwajith wrote in a post on X. "Along the way we realized personalization isn't just the future of finance. It's the future of software." These deals come as experts are raising questions about a limit to AI's ability to provide financial advice: it has no sense of fiduciary duty, meaning no obligation to act in a client's best interests. "The problem that we have to solve is not whether AI has enough expertise," Andrew Lo, a finance professor and director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told CNBC last week. "The answer right now is, clearly, AI has the [financial] expertise." But what they "don't have is that fiduciary duty," Lo added. "They don't have the ability to suffer consequences if they make a mistake to the same degree that a human advisor does." Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown consumers are increasingly turning to AI for tasks like organizing their personal finances. For instance, the data shows that 62% of Generation Z consumers said they were willing to use AI for "what if" financial planning.

OpenAI Buys Personal Finance Startup; Wants to Advise Us on Financial planning

The idea behind this acquisition could be two-fold - one is to further ChatGPT's prowess in personal finance and the other is to get OpenClaw fans on board OpenAI has done it again. At a time when the ChatGPT medical advice is increasingly coming under the scanner of experts, the company has gone ahead and acquired personal finance startup Hiro Finance for an undisclosed sum. This is their second acquisition in ten days after buying out media company TBPN that hosts a popular tech show. Even in this case, the AI startup did not disclose the nature of the deal or how much money was transacted. Which is quite surprisingly for a company that seeks to launch an IPO down the road. All that we have as information comes from Hiro Finance founder Ethan Bloch's LinkedIn post. The startup, which is backed by fintech VC firm Ribbit also has General Catalyst and Restive as its early investors. In the post, Bloch does not reveal the terms or the funds that were transacted. The Hiro CEO says in a social post that the company will shut down operations on April 20 and delete all data from its servers on May 13. So, is it an acquisition or a hiring? Only Sam Altman can tell. The post does say that all Hiro employees would be joining Bloch at OpenAI, but did not specify their number or the specific profiles. A look at the LinkedIn page of the company does show ten people associated with it since it was founded in 2024 and launched an AI tool some months ago. All that was mentioned was that Hiro provided AI-powered financial planning for customers whereby users entered their financial information such as salary, debts, and monthly expenses while the app used it's AI expertise to model out "what-if" scenarios to assist them in making financial decisions. More importantly, from an OpenAI perspective, it hands over personal data of individuals to an ever-hungry database that would potentially be used to train AI models of the future. Precisely the same reason opponents of ChatGPT Health are concerned of personal data being gobbled up by this tech giant for training their models. Over the past two years of its existence, Hiro AI was trained to figure out financial math with an added option that let users verify its accuracy. Ironically, the past few years have witnessed several such efforts via frontier models getting better at math and other calculations like the Stanford AI report noted. However, with financial math AI solutions are still dubious. The latest deal appears to make sense to OpenAI's well-known promotion of ChatGPT as a great tool for business finance teams. "ChatGPT Business helps finance teams keep analysis consistent, collaborate faster, and protect sensitive information -- all in one secure workspace," the company had said in a blog post some months ago. Given this background, it is hardly surprising that OpenAI is looking to add more professional talent and domain expertise into its team. There is also the other possibility that Sam Altman wants to make OpenAI popular with OpenClaw users (OpenAI has already hired its founder). Since Block already has an auto-trading OpenClaw agent called RoboBuffet (yes, you read it right), the company may be just trying to be different things to different people.

OpenAI Acquires Hiro Finance to Boost AI Financial Planning Tools

OpenAI acquires Hiro Finance, clearly signaling its intent to enter high-trust industries such as personal finance. This acquisition is largely considered an acquihire for OpenAI, with a specialized team joining to focus on enhancing AI's ability to reason numerically, plan, and make decisions. This move is just one of many major developments in artificial intelligence since AI now helps users perform tasks beyond content creation and conversation. The world now follows leaders who choose to work in fields that need exactness, accountability, and trustworthiness. The case allows researchers to study multiple areas, including , where even small mistakes can lead to serious problems.

OpenAI acquires Hiro Finance: What the AI startup offers

The app will stop operating on April 20, and all user data stored on its servers will be deleted by May 13. OpenAI has acquired AI personal finance startup Hiro Finance. The announcement was made by Hiro's founder Ethan Bloch on LinkedIn. Hiro will soon shut down its services. According to the company, the app will stop operating on April 20, and all user data stored on its servers will be deleted by May 13. Bloch confirmed that Hiro's employees will join OpenAI as part of the acquisition, suggesting the deal is largely focused on bringing talent into the company. While the exact number of employees moving to OpenAI wasn't disclosed, LinkedIn lists around 10 people connected to the startup. Hiro Finance was founded in 2023 and launched an AI-powered financial planning tool designed to help users make smarter financial decisions. The app asked users to enter key financial details such as salary, debts, savings and monthly expenses. Using this data, Hiro's AI could simulate different what-if scenarios. The goal was to help users understand their financial choices before making important decisions. Also read: Apple iPhone 18 Pro Max and iPhone 18 Pro leaks: From India price to specs, here is what we know Ethan Bloch is not new to the fintech world. Before launching Hiro Finance, he founded Digit, a digital banking service designed to help users automatically save money. Digit was later acquired by Oportun in 2021 for more than $200 million, reports TechCrunch. Also read: Google Pixel 11 Pro may launch soon globally: From India price to specs, here is what we know For now, OpenAI has not shared whether it plans to launch a dedicated financial planning product in the future. However, the acquisition suggests the company is exploring ways to expand AI tools for personal and business finance.