Rogo, a rising AI start-up aiming to replace the grunt work of junior investment bankers with a chatbot, has secured $50 million in Series B funding led by Thrive Capital, the venture firm founded by Joshua Kushner and a key early backer of OpenAI. The deal boosts Rogo’s valuation from $80 million to $350 million, just seven months after its previous $18.5 million fundraising round, according to the Financial Times.
Founded by former Lazard analyst Gabriel Stengel, Rogo has created an AI assistant designed specifically for investment banking workflows. The tool can analyze companies, benchmark competitors, and pull valuation comparisons — tasks that typically consume hours, if not days, for entry-level analysts.
“I thought, hey, you could make a real AI analyst for Wall Street that can help augment senior bankers, but also really help automate a lot of the grunt work that junior bankers are doing,” Stengel told the Financial Times.
Already deployed by firms including Moelis, Nomura, Tiger Global, and GTCR, Rogo is staking a claim in an increasingly competitive niche of domain-specific AI — offering a sharp contrast to more generalist models like ChatGPT. The company is part of a broader technology arms race on Wall Street, where players like JPMorgan Chase are developing proprietary large language models for in-house use, and rivals such as Mosaic offer deal analytics with minimal input.
Stengel, who previously covered biotech and pharma sectors, said tasks that once took him days — such as building “peak sales” valuation models from SEC filings and research reports — now take Rogo minutes. The product’s early adopters have already begun rethinking what the analyst role will look like in the AI age.
“The role of the analyst is probably going to have to shift because sitting down and doing models all day I don’t think is going to be the future,” said a junior banker who regularly uses Rogo.
The company’s ambitious vision doesn’t stop at automating spreadsheets. Rogo is actively training its AI to reason and offer insights at the level of senior investment professionals. “We’re training reasoning models that think like investors and investment bankers . . . It is a little scary,” Stengel said, adding that the goal is to match the insight of top-tier financiers like Blair Effron of Centerview or partners at Tiger Global.
The banking industry is still divided on how transformative tools like Rogo will be. While some fear a sharp reduction in entry-level jobs, others see AI as an enabler that will increase deal volume and, in turn, create more opportunities for rising bankers.
“Banks that adopt AI will win more deals, will generate more revenue and will be higher revenue per employee and they’ll want more bankers,” Stengel argued. “The only way to get deal-revenue-generating bankers is to train them and create MDs. And you can only do that if you have junior bankers who rise to that level.”
The Financial Times notes that Rogo’s success adds fuel to the debate over AI’s role in high-wage, white-collar industries — and raises broader questions about the future of finance careers in an age of rapid automation.
