Bloomberg — In a small Manhattan apartment in late 2021, three young investment bankers often worked into the early hours of the morning, working on spreadsheets and rearranging logos in slide shows, while one of their roommates took risks.
Gabriel Stengel had just left his job at Lazard to join John Willett, also a computer science graduate from Princeton University and a former JPMorgan Chase banker.
“A lot of the analytical work is done by a 21-year-old on 40-year-old tools at 2 a.m.,” Stengel, 27, said in an interview at the Park Avenue headquarters of his venture, Rogo Technologies. These thoughts bothered him early in his career: “Why do I have to use Excel? Why do I have to give a PowerPoint presentation?”
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Rogo, which they founded with 26-year-old computer scientist Tumas Rackaitis, just reached a $2 billion valuation in a fundraising round. This represents an increase from $750 million three months ago.
The new $160 million Series D round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with additional money coming from existing backers including Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and JPMorgan Chase’s Growth Equity Partners, Rogo reported Wednesday.
The company has more than 35,000 users and counts some of the world’s largest banks and private markets investors among its more than 250 clients, including Lazard, JPMorgan, Moelis, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to Bloomberg News.
The company offers a platform designed to ease workload – although some industry insiders fear it could also reduce the number of junior bankers.
Rogo’s founders left their banking careers at a time of great dissatisfaction among young people on Wall Street. The pandemic triggered a flurry of negotiations, and professionals at lower levels ended up working 24 hours a day in apartments, trying to keep up with demands.
In early 2021, a slideshow by junior bankers at Goldman Sachs complaining about conflicting workflows and nearly 100-hour work weeks went viral on social media.
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Rogo’s platform can create slideshows, design complex corporate restructurings, and produce research that can take an analyst dozens of hours to do manually.
Its workforce is evenly split between engineers and former finance professionals – called “forward deployed bankers” – who, in many cases, previously worked for the same companies they now advise, which helps them maximize what the tool can do.
Felix, the company’s AI agent, is named after Felix Rohatyn, a legendary Lazard investment banker who helped save New York City from financial collapse in the 1970s.
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One of Rogo’s features is the ability to switch between underlying AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Alphabet’s Gemini, so customers don’t need to invest all their money in one until it’s unclear which one might dominate the industry.
“For many of these executives, it’s a turbulent time – we want to pick the right competitor,” Stengel said. One of his former roommates, who worked late in investment banking while Stengel and Willett, also 27, created Rogo, now works in private equity and uses the software in his day job.
Rogo, along with other specialist AI companies such as Hebbia, has generated a lot of anxiety in the lower echelons of Wall Street regarding the prospect that machines will replace interns and then rise through the ranks.
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While Rogo’s founders acknowledge these concerns, they predict that junior bankers will benefit from being freed from heavy lifting so they can try out more meaningful roles earlier in their careers.
Ultimately, Stengel predicts the technology will give rise to “AI-first” investment banking, where staff will focus on “more human” parts of the job, offering insights and dealing with relationships.
History suggests that human roles will not suddenly disappear, but will evolve. “There will be more things for humans to do, more things for them to broaden their judgment and use their ambition,” he said.
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Despite the emergence of tools like Excel and data providers that have replaced previous manual work, investment banks have “become this massive, global enterprise,” said Rahul Rekhi, 34, who joined Rogo as president after spending a year in President Joe Biden’s Treasury Department and seven years at Lazard.
The founders, who opened an office in London in January and are hiring in Singapore, Japan and Australia, hope their software will help financial companies enter more markets.
They also predict that the software will democratize high finance, allowing leaner organizations and resource-strapped governments to perform complex work without paying high fees.
Wall Street professionals are famous for resisting giving up legacy software and platforms they’ve used for decades. And among AI enthusiasts, there are skeptics who paint Rogo as an unnecessary layer because finance professionals can do much of their work directly with large AI models, which can update themselves and threaten the company’s relevance.
In fact, leading AI companies have their own financial services teams launching products for the sector.
Rogo is racing to stay ahead by developing functions for due diligence, financing options and data organization. Its bosses, who hope to employ around 300 people by the end of the year, say it is fast becoming a financial infrastructure company rather than just a productivity tool.
The company can draw on a multitude of data providers and offer easily auditable and trackable citations to each data set. And its small army of finance experts can offer a personalized service that AI labs cannot.
On Wall Street, banks are already facing growing pains from AI. They are developing more sophisticated cyberattack protections, trying to make engineers and back offices work more efficiently with new tools, and untangling the tangles that result from multiple siled models and scattered data that has not been consolidated. Some companies have attempted to create their own tools, with varying success.
Using Rogo is already helping to increase the efficiency of Nomura Holdings’ trading groups, according to Patrice Maffre, international director of investment banking. He said Rogo’s technology “represents a step change in the speed of content” Nomura bankers can produce.
During fundraising, which will allow Rogo to invest more in its product and continue to expand internationally, Stengel used the tool to analyze his company’s numbers and produce graphs for potential investors.
In a presentation to Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid, the co-founder analyzed data on software usage rates at large banks, answering investor due diligence questions live in the room.
“Rogo is better than anything anyone has been able to build in-house,” said Hamid, whose company also invested in law firm Harvey’s AI agent. “I hope he changes the culture of the industry.”
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