Investment banking is going through a complex cultural period.
Consider the rise of HBO Industrywhich manages to make i-banking look dark, sexy and sometimes even swaggering. The world of Industry is filled with glass skyscrapers, cluttered offices, and hard-won but woefully hollow victories. It’s a generation’s introduction to investment banking, and it’s released just as a real-world balance sheet is gaining momentum. In recent months and years, heartbreaking stories have emerged investment banking associates who are dying on the job amid 100-plus hour workweeks and seemingly toxic work cultures.
Impossible jobs make good television, but impossible demands sooner or later become indefensible in real life. This means that there is an opportunity to improve these jobs. And banks, while they have recently (and very publicly) limited their associates’ work hours, are unlikely to do so alone.
Gabe Stengel worked at Lazard in investment banking from 2020 to 2022. He is now the CEO and co-founder of Rogo, a startup building an AI-based platform specifically for finance and its largest institutions. It’s ChatGPT-esque, which helps junior analysts streamline workflows, write memos, and generate templates and PowerPoints. Wall Street is in a moment of change, Stengel said Fortune.
“Wall Street has this rich heritage of people working very hard, often being overworked and where people don’t necessarily take care of each other,” he said. “I think it’s changing a lot, and that’s true in many industries. People are paying more attention to how they work and to their peers. Stakeholder capitalism, rather than shareholder capitalism, doesn’t right?…In the way I conceptualize it, (Rogo) is something that might actually prevent people from being overworked, I guess, because they’re more efficient.”
Stengel co-founded Rogo with John Willett and Tumas Rackaitis in 2022 to create a Wall Street-ready AI analyst. And if this all sounds grandiose, consider: Rogo went from zero to a seven-figure ARR in less than five months with just one sales rep, and is already fielding tens of thousands of queries daily. (The company declined to disclose more specific figures.)
Today, Rogo raised its $18.5 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures, Fortune can exclusively report. Keith Rabois was Khosla’s main partner in the deal. (Khosla was the first investor in OpenAI.) New investors include Jack Altman’s AltCapital, Original Capital and The Chainsmokers’ Mantis VC. Additionally, existing Rogo investors AlleyCorpBoxGroup and ScOp Venture Capital also participated in the round.
There are lateral competitors to Rogo, from internal tools developed by banks like JPMorgan Chase to AI tools deployed by Bloomberg and FactSet. But Stengel’s ambitions are considerable: Rogo’s ultimate goal, he says, is to be as ubiquitous as the Bloomberg Terminal. It also begins to place Rogo at the center of another wide-ranging cultural conversation: Will AI eliminate jobs? In finance at least, Stengel ultimately says no, because it remains a “learning business”.
“If you want to be the best private equity investor or the best banker, you’re going to have to learn from the best,” Stengel said. “There’s so much that goes into voiceover knowledge, trade secrets, and relationships. How can you actually focus on that? »
Rogo aims to automate the most routine tasks of young bankers, allowing them to “spend more time on the things that actually make investment banking and investing interesting”, such as “building relationships with real operators and entrepreneurs” . One of the things about the way Stengel talks about Rogo is that he seems constrained by a seemingly counterintuitive idea: that technology can make finance, well, a little more human. I told him about a friend of mine who started her career in investment banking and quickly ran away screaming, as the promise of difficult but interesting work turned into an untenable reality .
“This technology will help bring the promise closer to reality,” Stengel said. “A lot of smart, ambitious people are joining these banks because they’re interested in the work that the top managing directors are doing… But what happens is there’s so much at hand to sort out. But your friend joined for a reason. It’s because a big part of the job. East fascinating.”
And you know how we know that? There’s a whole TV show about this. Yes, in typical HBO fashion, lots of IndustryThe most thrilling scenes are moments of twisted interpersonal dynamics. But the scenes of Industry the ones that stood out to me the most were the ones where an associate takes back control in a high-stakes situation, doing what they signed up to do in the first place.
Elsewhere…Towards equity or not towards equity, that is the question. Forgive the reference, but there is actually an almost Shakespearean drama surrounding Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the issue of fairness. My colleagues Sharon Goldman, Kali Hays and Verne Kopytoff are here to explain it to you.
Scoop-let…Fintech is so back. I mean, maybe. Regardless, Restive Ventures, specializing in financial technology, has filed to raise its third fund with a cap of $70 million, according to an SEC filing. The company’s investments include AtlasBrico, Flex and Power, which were acquired in 2023 by Marqeta.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
E-mail: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com