ChatGPT becomes your personal banker: Popular financial startup bought and shut down by OpenAI

According to Bloch’s announcement, he and all Hiro employees are joining OpenAI. He did not specify the number of people involved, but LinkedIn lists about ten employees connected to the company. As part of the process, Hiro immediately stopped accepting new users.

The company announced that they will completely shut down their operations on April 20, while all data from their servers will be deleted on May 13. The financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, nor has the amount of investment that Hiro has accumulated during its existence. The startup was supported by leading VC companies such as Ribbit, General Catalyst and Restive.

A serial entrepreneur with impressive successes

This acquisition also stands out because of its founder. Ethan Bloch previously founded the neobank Digit, an application that helped users with automatic savings. In 2021, Digit was sold to the company Oportun for, as stated, more than 200 million dollars.

It is interesting that Hiro was the fifteenth project that Bloch started, and he started entrepreneurship as a thirteen-year-old. The first thirteen projects, as he himself said, failed. He sold his fourteenth project, Flowtown, a social networking tool, for $4.5 million.

Hiro, founded in 2023, offered users financial planning with the help of artificial intelligence. Users would enter their financial data such as salary, debts and monthly expenses, and the application would model different scenarios to help them make decisions. Bloch pointed out that Hiro was specially trained for precise financial calculations.

This is not the first financial application that OpenAI has acquired, which shows a clear interest in strengthening its capacity in that sector. Considering that OpenAI alreadyć promotes ChatGPT as a useful tool for business finance teams, the integration of experts from Hiro is a logical step. Experts see the move as preparation for ChatGPT’s transformation into a personal financial advisor that could analyze spending and offer personalized advice. Such ambitions are also supported by the enormous financial power of OpenAI, whose value after the last round of financing was estimated at 852 billion dollars.