Rohan Kodialam on Sphinx AI and building copilots for enterprise workflows

Rohan Kodialam is co-founder and CEO of Sphinx AI, a startup building AI copilots for data-heavy enterprise workflows. The core pitch is that large language models handle text, code, and images well but struggle with the tabular, semi-structured, and time-series data that underpins supply chains, manufacturing, and high finance. Sphinx targets that gap.

The initial commercial focus is quantitative finance. Kodialam, a former quant team lead at Citadel, says the earliest customers are hedge funds running day-by-day or intraday analysis — firms where a single data insight can generate billions in a year. He declines to name the first customer but confirms the segment is active quant traders rather than longer-horizon fundamental investors. The company runs a hybrid go-to-market: direct enterprise sales alongside a bottom-up motion where data scientists and quant researchers use the product off the shelf.

“Sphinx is building AI copilots for enterprise workflows, enabling teams to automate complex processes through natural language interactions.”

On the Excel question

Kodialam is direct that Microsoft Copilot in Excel is not a competitive threat worth worrying about. Serious data work — the kind that scales to production and generates material financial returns — runs on a different stack. Over time, he sees Excel becoming an interpretability layer on top of tools like Sphinx rather than a place where real work gets done. Prompt-based interfaces, he argues, are already easier than spreadsheet formulas.

Pricing and value capture

Sphinx charges on usage today. Kodialam acknowledges the value-capture problem candidly: hedge fund clients won't disclose what they found with the tool, making it structurally difficult to price against outcomes. The longer-term ambition is full autonomy — solving large-scale data problems in seconds without human intervention — at which point he expects the value, and the pricing power, to become obvious. For now, usage-based billing keeps the model simple.

Talent positioning

Sphinx has recruited from hedge funds (excluding Citadel, where Kodialam holds a non-solicit agreement) and has won candidates over Anthropic and OpenAI. His framing of the talent market is that foundation lab jobs are a bet on AGI, hedge fund jobs are a hedge against the AI bubble popping, and Sphinx offers something narrower — focused application work for people who want to solve one problem well.