OpenAI has acquired personal finance startup Hilo Finance, founder Ethan Block announced Monday, OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch. The startup is backed by Ribbit, a top fintech venture capital firm, as well as General Catalyst and Restive.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and Hiro did not disclose the amount raised. We’ll call this an acquisition because Hiro said it would cease operations on April 20th and remove all data from its servers on May 13th.
Bloch said in his post that Hilo employees are coming to OpenAI with him. He declined to say how many employees the company has, but LinkedIn lists about 10 people associated with the company. Bloch did not respond to requests for comment.
The company was founded in 2023 and released its AI tool about five months ago. Hiro provided AI-powered financial planning for consumers. Users enter financial information such as salary, debt, and monthly expenses, and the app models various what-if scenarios to help them make financial decisions.
Block said in a product demo that Hiro was specifically trained to accurately perform financial calculations, including an option for users to verify accuracy. Over the past few years, state-of-the-art frontier models have gotten significantly better at (and even better at) all kinds of mathematics. But historically this was not the case.
This deal stands out for several reasons. Bloch previously founded Digit, a digital-only bank that helps people save automatically. Digit was sold to Oportun in 2021 for more than $200 million, according to Oportun.
Additionally, this is not the first financial app that OpenAI has acquired. Given that OpenAI markets ChatGPT as a great tool for corporate finance teams, it’s easy to see why model makers are looking to add more talent to this department. We’ll have to wait and see if OpenAI intends to pursue financial planning as a more specialized app.
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The acquisition could also be an effort to increase OpenAI’s popularity among OpenClaw users, who tend to prefer Claude. OpenClaw is a popular agent for robotic stock trading. In fact, Block said on LinkedIn that he created his own automated trading OpenClaw agent, which he named RoboBuffett.
Another fun fact: Bloch told Business Insider that he started out as a tech entrepreneur when he was 13 years old, and this is Hiro’s 15th project. The first 13 attempts were unsuccessful, he said. He sold No. 14 Flowtown, a social media SaaS tool launched in 2009, for $4.5 million. Bloch said he sold Digit for about $230 million. Now, he has sold his latest startup to OpenAI. OpenAI is a company that has broken growth and funding records and could continue to break records with IPOs.
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