OpenAI has acquired Hiro Finance, an AI-powered personal finance startup, in what amounts to an acquihire. The founder announced the deal on LinkedIn on April 13 and OpenAI confirmed the acquisition. According to Ethan Baloch:
Hiro is joining OpenAI!
We started Hiro with the vision of building an AI personal CFO, and we worked relentlessly to make it real. Since then, we’ve helped clients plan for and manage more than $1 billion in assets, and we’re incredibly proud of what we’ve built and learned along the way.
Hiro launched its AI financial planning tool about five months ago after being founded in 2023. The app allowed users to enter financial details including salary, debts, and monthly expenses, then modeled different what-if scenarios to help them make financial decisions. The app was specifically trained to handle financial math accurately, and included a feature that let users verify the accuracy of calculations.
Because Hiro is shutting down its operations on April 20 and deleting all server data on May 13, the deal reads as a talent acquisition rather than a product acquisition. Terms were not disclosed and Hiro never publicly revealed how much it raised. The startup was backed by fintech venture firm Ribbit, as well as General Catalyst and Restive.
The founder behind Hiro is a serial entrepreneur with a notable track record. He previously founded Digit, a digital savings app that automatically moved small amounts of money into savings accounts for users. Digit sold to Oportun in 2021 for approximately $230 million. Before Digit, he sold Flowtown, a social media software tool, for $4.5 million in 2009. He told a business publication that Hiro was his 15th project, and that his first 13 ventures all failed.
This is not the first financial app OpenAI has acquired. The company already markets ChatGPT to business finance teams as a productivity tool. The Hiro deal suggests OpenAI is actively building out its capabilities in consumer and business financial planning, though whether it plans to launch a dedicated financial product remains to be seen.
The founder was also known for building a stock-trading agent called RoboBuffett using a popular AI coding tool, which he documented publicly on LinkedIn. That background in both financial planning and AI-powered investing tools adds another dimension to what OpenAI gains from the deal beyond core financial planning expertise.
Baloch concluded his post with:
To everyone who used Hiro: thank you. Thank you for believing in us early. Thank you for trusting us with your time, your feedback, and your finances. Building for you was a privilege. I’m sorry that the Hiro journey ends here, but I hope we earn the chance to serve you again through what we build next at OpenAI.
