Hiro will close on April 20 and delete all user data by May 13. Founder Ethan Bloch previously sold Digit to Oportun for more than $200 million. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Open AIthe San Francisco AI lab behind ChatGPT, acquired Hiro Finance, an AI-powered personal finance planning startup, and founder Ethan Bloch and his staff moved to OpenAI. Bloch announced the deal on LinkedIn and OpenAI confirmed it.
The terms were not disclosed, nor did Hiro publicly reveal how much he had raised. Hiro had approximately ten employees, all of whom will join OpenAI. Bloch did not respond to a request for further comment.
Hiro was founded in 2023 and launched its AI tool about five months ago. The app offered AI-based financial planning for consumers: Users entered information about their salary, debts, and monthly costs, and the platform modeled different what-if scenarios to support financial decision-making.
One notable design choice was a verification option that allowed users to verify the accuracy of the AI’s financial math, 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. Sold Flowtown, a social media SaaS tool launched in 2009, for $5 million. He later founded Digit, a digital-only bank designed to automate consumer savings, which was acquired by Oportun in 2021 for more than 00 million.
He has described Hiro as his fifteenth project, as he started building products when he was 13 and the first thirteen failed. 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 enterprise finance teams. The deal with Hiro adds talent focused on consumer financial planning, a category where specialized AI reasoning around budgeting, sequencing debt payments and optimizing savings requires a different product approach than general-purpose chat.
Yeah OpenAI intends to build A dedicated consumer financial planning product or incorporating the experience into its broader platform is still unclear.
