Ambrish Tyagi spent over three years leading AI teams at self-driving car company Cruise. Before that, he spent eight years working as an AI lead at Amazon. Now, Tyagi is bringing the same experience that helped build robotaxis and consumer products to solve a much different problem: the massive amount of money sitting idle in Americans' bank accounts.
Tyagi left Cruise in late 2024 to focus on building Rivo, a San Francisco-based startup he founded in 2025. Today, Rivo is launching publicly with a total of $3.1 million in funding, including a recent $2.7 million seed round that included participation from South Park Commons, Wisdom Ventures, Script Capital, 645 Ventures, 20VC, and angel investor Jag Duggal, the former chief product officer at Nubank.
Rivo works by sitting on top of a customer's existing checking account, moving idle cash into higher-yield, short-term U.S. Treasuries, then moving it back in time to cover bills. Tyagi, who built sensors and software for Cruise's self-driving cars and previously worked on AI products at Amazon, told This Week in Fintech that the company is working on “building the self-driving stack for finance.”
The startup has been letting customers in gradually from a waitlist and is now fully out of beta and open to the public, according to Tyagi.
An Advisor Who Did Nothing
The idea for the startup can be traced back to personal frustration related to his own finances that Tyagi experienced firsthand. Several years ago, Tyagi had a significant amount of cash being managed by a financial advisor at a large bank. He was startled to realize that nothing was going on with his funds.
“I had around several hundred thousand dollars just sitting in one of the big banks where my financial advisors were," he said in an interview. When he confronted the advisor, he was told, “You didn't tell me what to do.”
In the end, the advisor had earned the account roughly 40 basis points – less than half a percent – over a decade, while a treasury or money market fund could have paid four or five percent a year. The frustration and disappointment that Tyagi felt became, in his words, “the seed” of Rivo.
Learning From Self-Driving Cars
Tyagi, who holds a PhD in computer vision and AI, argues the hard part of both self-driving cars and automated personal finance is fundamentally very similar.
“When I started looking deeply into this, I realized the problem is not how do you solve 80% or 90% of this. You have to do this really, really accurately with high precision,” he said.
“It was never a problem for the car to drive down on a straight road. It was always these real-world messy edge cases, like a kid running out in front of a car,” Tyagi added. "Same thing in finance. There's a million different ways things can go wrong.”
Rivo trains its systems on simulated scenarios of what could go wrong, like an overdraft, so the software can practice before it happens to a real customer. For example, funds can't just disappear or multiply, which Tyagi says makes it easier to build safety checks around the AI.
“So with cars, we built a stack to generate synthetic data, trained the agents adversarially to handle these edge cases, and that essentially also kind of became the seed of what we're building at Rivo,” he added.
Rivo CEO and Founder Ambrish Tyagi/Credit: Rivo
Targeting the "Inertia Tax"
Rivo's product, Autopilot, targets cash sitting in checking accounts earning little to no interest. Tyagi estimates that Americans hold several trillion dollars in bank accounts, much of it at large banks paying almost no interest. He described that gap between what banks earn on that money and what they pay customers as the “inertia tax.”
“This is the single most profitable thing in consumer banking right now, and the only reason it works is that people are too busy to move their money,” Tyagi said.
Rivo doesn't require customers to switch banks. Rather, it sits on top of their existing bank accounts and uses Plaid* to make the connection.
“Rivo automatically analyzes cash flow in real time... and we bring the money back just in time for when those bills are due,” Tyagi said. Behind the scenes, Rivo works with banking partner and fellow fintech Jiko, which holds customer T-bills and handles broker-dealer execution.
A typical Rivo customer, per the launch materials, is a two-income couple making over $100,000 a year: bills on autopay, tens of thousands sitting in checking, earning close to 0.07% when it could earn several times that.
The goal is to fill what Tyagi describes as a gap between self-service, high-yield accounts and the hands-on management the wealthy get from private wealth managers.
“We're building the family office for everyone else,” he said.
Rivo makes money by charging a flat monthly management fee of 5 basis points, calculated on the average daily balance in a customer's account.
Tyagi, Rivo's sole founder, said the larger goal is a different mindset for consumer banking.
“J.P. Morgan Chase has built a beautiful business model, but honestly, as a customer, I don't think it's a customer-focused business,” he said. “I really want to marry the Amazon customer obsession with a banking model, which can be way more efficient given the world of AI and automation we live in right now.”
Investor POV
Aditya Agarwal, a general partner at South Park Commons, told This Week in Fintech that he was impressed by the size of the problem that Rivo is trying to solve, as well as the team’s caliber.
“More than $5 trillion sits idle in U.S. checking accounts earning close to nothing. It's a problem nearly every consumer has and almost no one notices, and it costs you more the busier you are. Ambrish… helped build one of the hardest autonomous systems ever put in front of consumers at Cruise, and he's now pointing that same execution capability at personal finance.”
In Agarwal’s view, most personal finance stops at advice.
“It tells you to move your money and leaves the actual work to you,” he said.
Rivo takes things a step further by acting on the customer's behalf “by moving real money.”
“I use the product and appreciate the transparency and immediacy of the flow of money,” he said. “Banks won't build this because it cuts against their own economics, and most fintechs can't, because doing it reliably requires years of autonomous-systems expertise. It's closer to a self-driving system for cash than to another savings app.”
(Disclosure: Plaid is the parent company of This Week in Fintech; it does not have any say in our editorial process.)
