OpenAI acquires fintech startup Hiro

OpenAI has acquired Hiro, a fintech startup, marking the latest step in a period of rapid expansion for the ChatGPT maker as it seeks to move beyond general-purpose models and into specialised, high-precision tools.

The acquisition is structured as an acqui-hire, which is an arrangement where a company is purchased primarily to recruit its talented employees rather than to continue its existing products. Consequently, the standalone Hiro app is scheduled to shut down on April 20.

Founded by Ethan Bloch, who previously led the fintech firm Digit, Hiro was designed as a personal AI CFO. A CFO, or chief financial officer, usually manages the complex financial health of a large organisation, but Hiro aimed to provide this level of sophisticated guidance to individual users.

According to Bloch, the startup had helped clients manage more than $1 billion in assets before the deal was struck. By joining OpenAI, the Hiro team intends to pursue its vision of improving financial well-being on a much larger scale.

The integration of Hiro into the OpenAI ecosystem addresses a long-standing challenge for large language models (LLMs), which is the tendency to produce hallucinations. In the world of AI, a hallucination occurs when a model generates information that sounds convincing but is factually or mathematically incorrect.

Hiro’s team specialises in high-precision financial modelling and mathematical accuracy. By bringing this expertise in-house, OpenAI hopes to accelerate the development of specialised financial agents within ChatGPT. These tools may include verification features that allow users to double-check the AI’s calculations.

The acquisition is part of a streak of purchases by OpenAI throughout 2025 and 2026. The organisation is diversifying its capabilities into various vertical markets such as healthcare or finance.

In January, OpenAI acquired Torch Health, a medical records app, and Crixet, a tool for editing LaTeX, which is a system used for technical and scientific documentation. In March, it added Promptfoo and Astral to its portfolio to bolster its developer tools and testing capabilities.

More recently, in April, OpenAI acquired TBPN, a media company, to lead a new communication strategy. And perhaps one the most ambitious of these moves was the May 2025 acquisition of Io, a deal worth $6.5 billion focused on AI-powered hardware and devices.

These actions suggest a future where OpenAI is not just a software provider but a multi-faceted technology giant involved in everything from physical devices to specialised professional services.

OpenAI’s rival, Anthropic, has followed a more selective but equally strategic path. In April, Anthropic made a significant entry into the life sciences sector by acquiring Coefficient Bio for approximately $400 million. It has also acquired Vercept for software development and Humanloop for evaluating model performance.

The financial competition between these two giants has intensified as businesses increasingly adopt agentic systems, which are AI tools capable of performing complex tasks autonomously rather than just answering questions. 

Interestingly, the revenue gap between the two companies has narrowed. OpenAI reported an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of $20 billion for 2025, which was a substantial increase from $6 billion the previous year. ARR is a metric used by subscription businesses to predict their total revenue for a year based on current monthly trends.

However, Anthropic has seen a steeper growth curve, reaching a $30 billion ARR in early 2026. This growth was heavily supported by Claude Code, its tool for software engineers.

While OpenAI remains more highly valued at approximately $852 billion compared to Anthropic’s $380 billion, the financial stakes are enormous for both.