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.

Whether OpenAI intends to build a dedicated consumer financial planning product or fold the expertise into its broader platform is not yet clear.