OpenAI Acquires Roi, an AI-Powered Personal Finance App

OpenAI has acquired Roi, an AI-powered personal finance app. In keeping with a recent trend in the AI industry, only the CEO is making the jump.

Chief executive and co-founder Sujith Vishwajith announced the acquisition on Friday, and a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch he is the only one of Roi’s four-person staff to join OpenAI. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company will wind down operations and end its service to customers on October 15.

The Roi deal marks the latest in a string of acqui-hires from OpenAI this year, including Context.ai, Crossing Minds, and Alex.

Alignment With OpenAI’s Strategy

While it’s not clear whether any of Roi’s technology will transfer over to OpenAI or which unit Vishwajith will join, the acquisition clearly aligns with OpenAI’s bet on personalization and life management as the next layer of AI products.

Roi brings a specialized team that has already tried to solve personalization in finance at scale — a challenge whose lessons can be applied more broadly.

About Roi

Roi, based in New York, was founded in 2022 and has raised $3.6 million in early-stage funding from investors like Balaji Srinivasan, Spark Capital, Gradient Ventures, and Spacecadet Ventures, according to PitchBook data.

Its mission was to aggregate a user’s financial footprint — including stocks, crypto, DeFi, real estate, and NFTs — into one app that could track funds, provide insights, and help people make trades.

“We started Roi 3 years ago to make investing accessible to everyone by building the most personalized financial experience,” Vishwajith wrote in a post on X. “Along the way we realized personalization isn’t just the future of finance. It’s the future of software.”

A Personalized AI Companion

Beyond tracking trades, Roi gave users access to a financially savvy AI companion that responded in ways that made sense for them.

When signing up, users could personalize Roi by providing information such as what they do for a living and how they wanted Roi to respond to them.

“Talk to me like I’m a Gen-Z kid with brain rot. Use as little words as possible and roast me as much as you want I don’t mind.”

“Suje, you got cooked lil bro. Cause of the tariff announcements, you took an L today of $32,459.12… Based on your risk preference this might be an opportunity to buy the dip.”

This exchange highlights Roi’s philosophy — that software shouldn’t just provide generic answers, but should adapt, learn, and communicate in ways that feel personal, human, and engaging.

Roi’s Vision and OpenAI’s Future

“The products we use every day won’t remain static, predetermined experiences. They’ll become adaptive, deeply personal companions that understand us, learn from us, and evolve with us.”

• Pulse — generates personalized news and content reports for users as they sleep.
• Sora — a TikTok competitor filled with AI-generated content, including personal cameos from users.
• Instant Checkout — lets users shop and make purchases directly in ChatGPT.

Expanding Consumer Applications

The deal also comes as OpenAI beefs up its consumer applications team, led by former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.

It’s another sign that OpenAI isn’t just trying to be an API provider — it wants to build end-user apps. Roi’s talent and tech could slot right into these apps and help make them more adaptive.

Vishwajith’s Background and Revenue Focus

Vishwajith, alongside co-founder Chip Davis, previously worked at Airbnb, where he developed a knack for optimizing user behavior to drive revenue.

By his account, a simple change of 25 lines of code led to $10+ million in additional cash.

Being able to generate meaningful revenue via consumer apps is more important than ever to OpenAI as it continues to spend billions on data centers and infrastructure to power its models.