NYC Fintech Startup Rogo Closes $160M Series D, Bringing Total Funding to $300M
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NYC Fintech Startup Rogo Closes $160M Series D, Bringing Total Funding to $300M

New York-based AI platform Rogo secured a landmark Series D round on April 29, 2026, cementing its position as the leading AI infrastructure company for Wall Street.

Three former Princeton classmates who once crunched numbers at J.P. Morgan and Lazard just raised $160 million to prove that the future of investment banking runs on artificial intelligence. Rogo, the New York-based generative AI platform built for financial services, announced on April 29, 2026 that it closed a Series D funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, pushing its total raised capital past $300 million. The raise signals a defining moment not just for the company, but for an entire industry in the middle of a fundamental shift in how financial work gets done.

From a Princeton Thesis to Wall Street’s Operating System

The story behind Rogo begins the way many New York startup stories do — with a problem that its founders knew firsthand.

Gabriel Stengel, John Willett, and Tumas Rackaitis met as classmates at Princeton and went on to work at J.P. Morgan and Lazard before founding the company in January 2022. Their inspiration came from the release of GPT-3 for developers, which led them to leave their finance jobs and expand on their senior thesis, which had focused on building a chatbot for econometrics.

What began as an academic exercise evolved into a platform that now sits at the center of how investment banks, private equity firms, and asset managers operate. The trio recognized early that the financial industry was drowning in repetitive, high-stakes analytical work — the kind of output that once required rooms full of junior bankers working through the night. They built Rogo to change that equation entirely.

Rogo combines purpose-built financial reasoning models with deep integrations across internal and external data sources to automate research, accelerate workflows, and deliver analyst-grade insights in seconds.

The Round and Who Backed It

The $160 million Series D was led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Sequoia, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, BoxGroup, Mantis VC, Jack Altman, Evantic, and Positive Sum.

The investor mix is notable. J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners is not a passive financial backer — it is one of Rogo’s key institutional clients, making this a vote of confidence from within the very industry the platform serves. When a firm like J.P. Morgan puts capital behind a startup it already uses operationally, the signal to the broader market is difficult to ignore.

Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid framed the opportunity in terms that go beyond a single company’s prospects. “Their combination of technical depth, proprietary data integrations, and genuine domain expertise is why Rogo is pulling away from the field. When a platform becomes the operating system for an entire industry, the opportunity is generational,” Hamid said.

That framing — Rogo as an operating system, not merely a tool — reflects how the company and its backers are thinking about the long-term runway ahead.

Scale, Reach, and the Institutions That Rely on It

In a market where many AI startups struggle to get past the pilot phase with enterprise clients, Rogo has achieved the kind of institutional adoption that most fintech companies spend years chasing.

NYC Fintech Startup Rogo Closes $160M Series D, Bringing Total Funding to $300M (2)

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More than 35,000 financial professionals at over 250 institutions, including Rothschild & Co, Jefferies, Lazard, Moelis, and Nomura, use Rogo in their daily workflows across origination, execution, advisory, and portfolio intelligence.

Those numbers represent real daily usage across some of the most rigorous operating environments in global finance — not demo accounts, not pilot programs. Analysts and managing directors alike are using Rogo to conduct research, build models, and generate outputs that previously required significant manpower.

At firms where Rogo has been deployed, more than 100 analysts run 10,000 or more workflows weekly, with 95 percent engagement rates. For a B2B enterprise platform, that level of retention reflects genuine workflow dependency rather than novelty adoption.

Introducing Felix: Rogo’s Autonomous Finance Agent

The Series D announcement also marked the wider unveiling of Felix, Rogo’s newest and most ambitious product — an agentic AI built to handle complex, multi-step financial processes without requiring human intervention at every stage.

Financial professionals can interact with Felix by sending it emails. Rogo says Felix customizes the information it generates based on users’ roles. If an analyst who covers Apple requests a report about its financial performance, the agent might offer to update the report every time the company reports earnings.

The implications for the traditional banking workflow are significant. Tasks that have historically occupied the first two years of a junior analyst’s career — building financial models in Excel at 2 a.m., pulling comparables, formatting investor memos — can now be executed autonomously by Felix. Felix can automatically create presentations, models, and documents, and handles deal screening, Confidential Information Memorandum generation, buyer outreach, and data room diligence.

CEO Gabriel Stengel described the broader shift underway. “The institutions at the forefront are rapidly moving beyond automating tasks to becoming AI-native firms, with agentic systems that work across the firm and get smarter with every deal,” Stengel said.

What the Funding Will Build

The fresh capital is directed toward accelerating Rogo’s international growth, deepening ties with major financial institutions, and expanding Felix.

Rogo plans to strengthen its European operations through the team from its acquisition of Plux AI, a UK firm that tracks complex financial market developments, whose founders joined Rogo to lead its EMEA expansion. Asia is also on the roadmap, with demand rising from regional investment banks seeking AI tools built to meet the compliance and data standards of tightly regulated markets.

The company is also expanding its Forward Deployed Bankers model — experienced finance professionals who embed directly within client institutions to support onboarding from analyst to managing director level. It is an approach that borrows from enterprise software playbooks but applies it with the kind of financial credibility that generic AI vendors cannot replicate.

NYC’s AI Moment on Wall Street

Rogo’s trajectory is also a story about New York City’s continued dominance at the intersection of finance and technology. The company was born in Manhattan, is backed in part by firms headquartered on or near Wall Street, and serves an industry that defines the city’s economic identity.

The raise positions Rogo at a $2 billion valuation, up from $750 million following its Series C in January 2026 — less than four months ago. That kind of valuation acceleration reflects both the quality of the underlying business and the current intensity of investor appetite for AI platforms with verified enterprise traction.

As the five major U.S. indices close at or near record highs and financial institutions accelerate their technology budgets, the timing of Rogo’s raise lands in favorable conditions. The company enters its next phase with capital, partnerships, institutional scale, and a product that its clients are already depending on — every day, across every major deal.

For three former analysts who once built econometrics chatbots in a Princeton dorm, the view from Wall Street looks considerably different now.

Reporting and analysis from the NY Weekly editorial desk.