- OpenAI has acquired Hiro Finance, the AI-powered personal finance startup founded by serial entrepreneur Ethan Bloch.
- Hiro was backed by fintech heavyweights Ribbit Capital, General Catalyst, and Restive.
- The startup will shut down operations on April 20 and wipe all user data from its servers on May 13, making this a classic acquihire.
- Bloch previously built Digit, the automatic savings bank sold to Oportun in 2021 for more than $200 million.
OpenAI Picks Up Another Fintech Team for ChatGPT
OpenAI has acquired Hiro Finance in an acquihire that brings Bloch and roughly ten employees into the company, Bloch announced Monday and OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch. Terms were not disclosed, and Hiro never revealed how much it raised from Ribbit, General Catalyst, and Restive. The startup will shut down operations on April 20 and delete all customer data on May 13, a hard ending for a consumer product that only launched about five months ago.
Hiro offered an AI-powered financial planner that ingested salaries, debts, and monthly costs to model what-if scenarios for users trying to make smarter money decisions. Bloch trained the product to nail financial math and built in a verification option for every answer — a response to the well-documented weakness frontier models have historically had with arithmetic. The acquisition slots cleanly alongside OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation and its push to make ChatGPT the default AI tool for business finance teams, a segment where accuracy on numbers is table stakes.
Ethan Bloch’s 15th Startup Lands Inside the Fastest-Growing Company in Tech
This is the second financial app OpenAI has bought, and it fits a pattern: the company keeps adding specialist fintech talent rather than building personal finance features from scratch. Whether Hiro’s planner becomes a dedicated ChatGPT finance mode or simply disappears into the model is unclear, but OpenAI is clearly building depth in the best AI personal finance app category before rivals like Anthropic and Google get there. Bloch himself is an interesting acquisition — beyond Digit, he was an early believer in agentic trading and built his own auto-trading bot on the OpenClaw framework, the open-source agent stack that has become the de facto base layer for robo stock trading experiments.
Hiro is Bloch’s 15th project. He told Business Insider that the first 13 failed, and that he started building tech at 13 years old. He sold Flowtown, a social media SaaS tool launched in 2009, for $4.5 million, and later sold Digit to Oportun for about $230 million. Now he’s sold his third company to OpenAI, a business that has broken records for growth, fundraising, and valuation and is still widely expected to deliver the biggest tech IPO of the decade. For a founder who has spent fifteen years iterating on consumer fintech, landing inside the most valuable private AI company in the world is a strong exit — even if Hiro users have 29 days to export their data before the servers go dark.
