OpenAI has acquired Roi, a personal finance app, marking another “acqui-hire†move by the company. The deal highlights OpenAI’s growing interest in personalised advice tools. “Roi, known for its expertise in personalised investment advice across stocks, crypto, DeFi, and NFTs, will shut down its consumer app by October 2025, as its team, including CEO Sujith Vishwajith, joins OpenAI”, said the press release from OpenAI. For the Indian context, the timing of this deal coincides with SEBI weighing in on the use of AI in the securities markets.Â
Roi, a personal finance app that has been recently acquired by OpenAI, dubs itself as the “ultimate finance appâ€. 100,000+ investors use the app for tracking their net worth, to manage and track all investments and trades and to “copy the trades of famous investorsâ€. Apart from these features, Roi boasts a recently launched AI financial companion feature that is “like ChatGPT†allowing for financial personalisation backed by real-time market data. The users can ask questions such as “Should I invest in Nvidia?†and obtain instant responses backed by real-time market data.
The OpenAI-Roi deal follows a string of recent startup acqui-hires by OpenAI, such as the team behind Context.ai, which produced “client-ready decks, models, docs, and emailsâ€; Crossing Minds, which studied the behaviour of customers on e-commerce sites to provide insights on shopping preferences; and Alex, which provided “AI-powered debugging for developersâ€. These acquisitions have been termed “acqui-hires†because members of the founding teams of such startups then join OpenAI, such as Roi’s co-founder, Sujith Vishwajith, joining OpenAI. All these four startups, including Roi, provide personalised solutions, which are of increasing importance for OpenAI in providing more context-specific and accurate solutions to its end users. The expertise of such startups as brought in by their members is likely to help in better product development at OpenAI, as evidenced by Scott-Green from Context AI joining as Product Manager at OpenAI.
Roi’s acquisition is of interest as it points to OpenAI’s interests in responding to finance-related questions posed by ChatGPT users. As of now, the response seems to be informative and slightly dated rather than informed by real-time data, which could be where Roi’s manner of responding to user queries proves to be useful.
In India, Paytm partnered with Perplexity earlier this year in providing AI-powered search to its users allowing “users to ask everyday questions, explore topics in their local language, and make informed financial decisionsâ€. This collaboration precedes the OpenAI acquisition of Roi and points to a growing trend in the AI world of enabling real-time financial assistance for end-users. In India, these developments intersect with SEBI’s Investment Advisers (Second Amendment) Regulations, 2024 and the consultation paper on responsible AI/ML in securities markets.
SEBI has flagged concerns around fairness, accountability, investor protection and data privacy in any AI-driven financial advice. If Roi’s features find a place in OpenAI’s model, it is likely to clash with SEBI’s regulations. PayTM’s partnership with Perplexity deserves further scrutiny so as to ascertain the impact of providing financial advice to users. Such an analysis would allow for potential drawbacks to be proactively addressed by SEBI before financial advice as provided through OpenAI becomes mainstream in India.
This matters because it highlights a policy gap concerning product innovation in the development and deployment of AI models. For OpenAI, the acquisition of Roi highlights its growing push into personalisation so that the use value of its products increases for the users. For India, this acts as a reminder that AI developments such as Perplexity powered chat on Paytm move faster than existing regulatory mechanisms which are left to play catch up. As Indian fintechs adopt AI tools and global players like OpenAI expand their capabilities, the regulatory balance between innovation and accountability will be tested.
