With its latest acqui-hire, OpenAI is doubling down on personalized consumer AI (techcrunch.com)

OpenAI has acqui-hired Roi, a four-person NYC startup offering an AI-powered personal finance app; only co-founder and CEO Sujith Vishwajith is joining OpenAI and Roi will shut down its service on October 15. Terms weren’t disclosed; Roi had raised about $3.6M. Roi’s product aggregated a user’s financial footprint—stocks, crypto, DeFi, real estate and NFTs—and paired it with a customizable AI companion that adapted tone, risk preferences and advice to each user (the company touted sign-up prompts like occupation and preferred voice, and examples ranged from blunt “Gen‑Z roast” replies to tailored portfolio recommendations). The deal signals OpenAI doubling down on personalization and consumer-facing apps rather than being only an API provider. Technically, Roi’s main asset is its experience engineering adaptive, large‑scale personalization for sensitive, multimodal financial data—a set of lessons applicable to OpenAI products such as Pulse, Sora and Instant Checkout. That expertise could accelerate “life-management” features that keep users engaged and monetize consumer flows, helping OpenAI justify heavy infrastructure spend. It’s unclear which systems or engineers beyond Vishwajith (or code) will be integrated, but the move underscores a strategic push to bake context-aware, persona-driven AI into end-user products.