From Mumbai to OpenAI: How Rushabh Doshi built and sold his AI powered startup to Sam Altman

“As Rushuabh Doshi and I got to know the team at OpenAI, it became clear that joining forces would give us the opportunity to pursue that vision at a much larger scale. For decades, personalised financial guidance has been too expensive, too generic, or too hard to access. ChatGPT is finally changing that,” Ethan wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Rushabh Doshi – Early life and education

Born and raised in India, Doshi completed his early education at Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI) in Mumbai before moving to the United States. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later a Master of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Doshi began his career as a software engineer at Microsoft, working on clustering Windows machines. He then joined Google’s YouTube division, where he started and built the first YouTube video editor, a product that later evolved into a suite of mobile video editing apps used by billions. He went on to build consumer products at scale at Facebook (now Meta).

In 2020, Doshi joined automated savings app Digit as Chief Product Officer alongside Ethan Bloch. Together, they helped transform Digit into a comprehensive financial platform covering savings, investments, and banking. Digit helped millions of users save over a billion dollars before fintech lender Oportun acquired it in 2021 for approximately $238 million.

How Doshi and Bloch Built Hiro Finance

After exiting Digit, Doshi dove deep into large language models (LLMs) while Bloch stepped back to focus on family. The exploration reignited a shared decade-long dream: building a true AI-powered personal CFO. In early 2024, the pair co-founded Hiro Finance.

As co-CEO, Doshi led a team of roughly 10 people to build an intelligent financial-planning assistant focused on complex “what-if” modelling and rigorous financial mathematics, addressing a key weakness in early AI systems. The startup quickly attracted backing from elite investors including Ribbit Capital, General Catalyst, and Restive, though the exact funding amount was never disclosed.

Hiro officially launched its product around November 2025. Users could input details such as salary, debts, monthly expenses, and goals, and the platform would generate dynamic scenarios to support decision-making, for example, modelling the impact of buying a home at different price points or taking a career break.

What differentiated the product, according to the company, was its focus on computational accuracy: the team developed purpose-built tools to overcome early AI shortcomings in complex financial calculations. In its brief operational life, Hiro helped clients plan for and manage more than $1 billion in assets.

Hiro’s OpenAI acquisition

The deal, announced on April 13, 2026, brings Doshi and the entire Hiro team into OpenAI. Hiro will cease accepting new signups immediately and shut down operations by April 20, with all user data to be deleted by May 13. Financial terms were not disclosed.

“We started Hiro with the vision of building an AI personal CFO, and we worked relentlessly to make it real,” the Hiro team said in a statement. “As we got to know the team at OpenAI, it became clear that joining forces would give us the opportunity to pursue that vision at a much larger scale for a much broader audience.”

OpenAI has long signalled interest in the fintech space. With the Hiro acquisition, the company could integrate specialised financial reasoning capabilities into ChatGPT or dedicated platforms, potentially under its premium subscription offerings.

For Doshi, the move represents the latest chapter in a career defined by building consumer products at scale — from YouTube’s first video editor to Digit’s savings platform, and now AI-powered financial planning at the world’s most prominent AI company.