OpenAI Picks Up Hiro Finance In Move That Shuts Down The Startup’s Service

OpenAI has acquired Hiro Finance, the short-lived personal finance startup, its founder announced on LinkedIn Monday and the company later confirmed to TechCrunch. Hiro plans to cease customer-facing operations on April 20 and will remove all user data from its systems by May 13, and its team is joining OpenAI — a shift that observers say looks like an acqui-hire. Terms of the deal were not released and Hiro never disclosed how much capital it raised. LinkedIn shows roughly ten people connected to the venture; founder Ethan Bloch declined further comment.

Launched in 2024 and rolling out its AI tool about five months ago, Hiro offered consumers an automated planning assistant. Users supplied information such as pay, liabilities and recurring expenses and the software modeled a range of hypothetical scenarios to guide decisions. The product was trained specifically to perform precise financial calculations and included a feature letting users check the accuracy of its arithmetic — a response to the fact that large language systems have only recently improved on numerical tasks.

Hiro counted several established fintech investors among its backers, including Ribbit, General Catalyst and Restive, though the financing details remain private. Bloch brings a lengthy entrepreneurial track record: he previously founded neobank Digit, which he sold to Oportun in 2021 for roughly $230 million, and earlier sold Flowtown, a social media software business, for about $4.5 million. He’s said Hiro was his 15th startup after beginning as a teen; several prior projects did not pan out.

The purchase expands OpenAI’s footprint in financial services, an area the company has already targeted with business-facing features in ChatGPT. Industry watchers say adding specialized talent could help OpenAI refine offerings used by corporate finance teams or create a consumer-facing money-management product. The move may also resonate with users of third-party trading agents; Hiro’s founder has experimented with an OpenClaw autotrading agent called RoboBuffett and OpenClaw is popular among some retail traders who favor alternative models.

Privacy and regulatory questions will likely follow. With Hiro erasing user records mid-May, affected customers have a narrow window to retrieve their data. A fintech strategist contacted for perspective suggested the hire could accelerate OpenAI’s work on accuracy and compliance in finance-focused models, but warned that integrating banking-grade features will invite closer scrutiny from regulators and from users concerned about how financial information is handled.