On April 14th, local time, Ethan Bloch, founder of personal finance startup Hiro Finance, announced that OpenAI had acquired the company. OpenAI also confirmed this to TechCrunch. This startup had previously received investment from top fintech venture capital firms such as Ribit, General Catalyst, and Restive.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and Hiro has never publicly revealed its total funding amount. Given Hiro’s announcement that it will cease operations on April 20th and delete all data from its servers on May 13th, this acquisition is essentially a talent acquisition.
In the announcement, Bloch stated that all Hiro employees will join OpenAI with him. He did not disclose the specific number, but LinkedIn data shows approximately 10 employees associated with the company.
Founded in 2023, Hiro launched its AI tool about five months ago, providing AI-driven financial planning services for individual consumers. Users can input financial information such as salary, debt, and monthly expenses; the application simulates different hypothetical scenarios to assist users in making financial decisions.
In the product demonstration, Bloch mentioned that Hiro is specially trained to handle financial mathematical calculations and allows users to verify the accuracy of the calculation results. While the performance of top-tier, cutting-edge models in various mathematical operations has improved significantly in recent years, their mathematical capabilities were generally weak before this.
This acquisition is noteworthy for several reasons. Bloch previously founded Digit, a digital bank that helped users automate savings; the company was sold to Oportun in 2021 for over $200 million (approximately 1.369 billion RMB at current exchange rates).
Furthermore, this isn’t OpenAI’s first acquisition of a financial application. Considering OpenAI positions ChatGPT as a practical tool for corporate finance teams, it’s understandable why the modeling company wants to expand its talent pool in the financial sector. Whether OpenAI plans to launch more specialized financial planning applications remains to be seen.
This talent acquisition may also be aimed at increasing OpenAI’s popularity among OpenClaw users, who typically prefer Claude. In fact, Bloch revealed on LinkedIn that he developed an automated trading OpenClaw agent called “RoboBuffett.”
Another interesting detail: In an interview with Business Insider, Bloch stated that Hiro is his 15th project. He started his tech entrepreneurial journey at the age of 13, with his first 13 projects all ending in failure. His 14th project was Flowtown, a social media SaaS tool launched in 2009, which was eventually sold for $4.5 million (approximately RMB 30.793 million at the current exchange rate). He stated that Digit was sold for approximately $230 million (approximately RMB 1.574 billion at the current exchange rate). Now, he has sold his latest startup to OpenAI—a company that has broken records in both growth rate and funding size, and whose future IPO is expected to set new records.
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