There is a certain kind of entrepreneur who keeps coming back to the same problem — not because the previous solution failed, but because the problem itself has changed. Ethan Bloch is that kind of entrepreneur. Since he was a teenager, he has been building things at the intersection of technology and personal finance. His 15th attempt landed at OpenAI.
The Arc of a Serial Founder
Bloch told Business Insider that Hiro was the 15th project he launched, having started as a tech entrepreneur when he was 13 years old. The first 13 failed. He sold his 14th, Flowtown, a social media SaaS tool launched in 2009, for $4.5 million. Bloch said he sold Digit for about $230 million.
Hiro has been a dream he had for around 15 or so years. When he sold Flowtown, he had made enough money to do whatever he wanted but not too much where he had to do nothing. That was when the idea for what would eventually become Digit began.
Digit — the neobank that helped people automatically save money by analyzing spending patterns and moving small amounts into savings without users having to think about it — was not just a successful company. It was a proof of concept for a thesis Bloch had been developing: that most people are not bad with money because they lack information. They are bad with money because the system is not designed to help them. “For decades, personalized financial guidance has been too expensive, too generic or too hard to access,” Bloch wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the Hiro acquisition. “ChatGPT is finally changing that. The mission that brought us to Hiro, and to Digit before that, has not changed: improving people’s financial well-being. If anything, it feels even more important now.”
What Hiro Actually Built
Founded by co-CEOs Ethan Bloch and Rushabh Doshi in 2024, Hiro introduced its AI-powered tool around five months before its acquisition. The solution integrated data from users’ financial products — such as credit cards and savings accounts — and acted as a personal assistant to provide tailored financial recommendations and answer queries. The startup raised $6.3 million in seed funding, backed by Ribbit Capital, General Catalyst, Restive, and various angels.
Bloch reflected on the journey in his LinkedIn post: “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 was specifically trained to handle financial math, including an option that allowed users to verify accuracy. While state-of-the-art frontier models have gotten significantly better at math generally, Bloch built Hiro with precision as a deliberate product priority — because in personal finance, a wrong calculation is not an inconvenience, it is a material error with real consequences.
The Terms of the Deal
OpenAI confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch. Terms were not disclosed, nor did Hiro ever disclose how much money it raised. The deal is structured as an acqui-hire: Bloch said that Hiro employees are coming with him to OpenAI, though he did not specify how many. LinkedIn lists about 10 people associated with the company.
The Hiro product stopped functioning on April 20, 2026. Users can export their data from settings on Hiro’s web app until May 13, 2026, after which all personal data will be permanently deleted from Hiro’s servers. User data will not be shared with OpenAI.
CCG Catalyst managing partner Paul Schaus told American Banker that the purpose of the deal was not to integrate an existing product: “It is bringing a team and a founder who knows how to build consumer finance tools that people use. Ethan Bloch built Digit, sold it and now he’s at OpenAI. It seems the product was a vehicle to demonstrate the capability.”
Why OpenAI Wanted This Team Specifically
OpenAI isn’t just acquiring a fintech team — it is hiring an entrepreneur who already understands building consumer products in finance, a sector where trust, education, and precision are as crucial as the quality of the model itself.
This is the Hiro deal’s real value, and it is easy to miss when focusing on the product shutdown. Bloch spent years at Digit learning how consumers actually behave with their money — not how they say they behave, but how they respond when an automated system starts moving funds on their behalf. That behavioral understanding is not something a language model acquires from training data. It comes from operating a consumer finance product at scale, watching users cancel, return, and recommend it.
Pitchbook fintech analyst Rudy Yang told American Banker that the Hiro deal could broaden the range of people who use personal finance management tools, should OpenAI use Hiro’s team to build something similar under its own brand. “Historically, personal financial management has been limited to spreadsheet-savvy users or people already seeking it out. But major LLMs are already seeing millions of users ask personal finance questions. OpenAI is leaning into that signal and thinking strategically about how to make their product stickier.”
A Pattern OpenAI Is Building Toward
This was not OpenAI’s first fintech acquisition. In early October 2025, the company hired Sujith Vishwajith, co-founder and CEO of the personal finance app Roi, in what Vishwajith described on X as an “acquisition.” Roi sunsetted its operations by October 15, 2025.
According to Javelin Research senior digital banking analyst Dylan Lerner, the two back-to-back fintech startup deals indicate a broader trend of AI-tech companies moving into finance rather than the other way around. “This acqui-hire move was an aggressive push into financial services. They are building capabilities related to financial intelligence, which is positioning them to own more of what I have been calling ‘share of mind.'”
OpenAI is increasingly acting like a platform publisher seeking sector-specific anchoring points: finance, media, enterprise, agents, and productivity. For Ethan Bloch, who has been working on this particular problem since he day-traded his bar mitzvah money at age 13, that platform may finally be large enough to do what he has always wanted to do.
