Rogo raises $160M at $2B to bring AI to investment banking's back office
Rogo, the AI platform for investment banking and finance, has raised $160M in a Series D round led by Kleiner Perkins, at a $2B valuation.
Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, J.P. Morgan , BoxGroup, Mantis Venture Capital, and Jack Altman all participated, alongside new investor Evantic Capital. The company is now deployed across many of the world's top investment banks, asset managers, and private equity firms.
Rogo was founded in late 2021 around a kitchen table in a Manhattan apartment by Gabriel Stengel , who left Lazard to build it, and John Willett , a former JPMorgan banker — both Princeton computer science graduates. The product automates the research, analysis, and presentation work that consumes junior bankers' time: building models, assembling slide decks, aggregating data. It is expanding its London office and growing across the Asia-Pacific region.
Investment banking has long been one of the most data-intensive and labour-intensive industries in finance, yet one of the slowest to adopt automation. The arrival of capable generative AI has made it possible, for the first time, to automate tasks that previously required expensive human judgment — combing through filings, building comparable company analyses, drafting pitch materials. Banks are under pressure to do more with smaller junior teams, and Rogo offers a credible way to do that.
The timing also reflects a maturation in how financial institutions think about AI risk. Early resistance — centred on data security, hallucination risk, and regulatory exposure — is giving way to cautious adoption as enterprise-grade AI platforms demonstrate sufficient reliability and compliance infrastructure.
Financial AI is attracting significant competition. Bloomberg, Microsoft, and a growing number of well-funded startups are all targeting the same workflows. Banks are also deeply protective of their proprietary data and relationships, which can make deep integration slow and commercially unpredictable. A major data breach or high-profile AI error at a client firm could set back adoption across the sector.
Rogo's model of embedding forward-deployed bankers and engineers within client firms is differentiated but expensive to scale — it is closer to a professional services model than a pure software play, which limits margin expansion as the company grows.
Rogo's $2B valuation is a benchmark moment for financial AI as a category. The company's founding story — junior bankers building a tool to automate their own jobs — has become a template repeated across professional services. The question is no longer whether AI will transform investment banking, but which platforms will capture the most value as that transformation accelerates.
J.P. Morgan's participation as an investor is particularly notable. Banks investing in the AI tools their own employees use signals that the era of cautious observation is ending — and that financial institutions are now actively shaping the technology that will remake their industry.
Sources:
Rogo
PR Newswire
Bloomberg
FF News
Gabriel Stengel, LinkedIn post
Image credit:
Rogo
J.V.
