Rogo raises $160M Series D at $2B valuation as AI reshapes Wall Street knowledge work

Speaker 1: very very exciting times and we appreciate you both coming on the show Yeah. To break down for us. Great to see you. I'm very I'm very excited for your partnership. And congratulations on the round. We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 9: Cheers. Thank you. Bye.

Speaker 1: Up next, we have Gabe from Rogo. He's the founder and CEO for the massive series d raise. Let's bring in Gabe. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing? Sup, guys? Thanks for having me. Great to Anytime. See you Big news. Let's kick it off. How much did you raise? I wanna hit the gong.

Speaker 11: 160,000,000, $2,000,000,000 valuation. Woah. Fantastic.

Speaker 2: Leaves of valuation for the rest of them.

Speaker 1: Sequoia Capital again. I think we went three Sequoia companies. This is the Sequoia show, I guess, right now. But Thrives in Coastal, JPMorgan, Box Group, Mantis, Jack Altman, you got a whole crew, of Murderer's Row. What's driving the growth? Why are they putting more money in? Why is the business working?

Speaker 11: So this was led by Kleiner. So it's new new investors. Yeah. Mamou and Nadia, super excited to work with that whole team. I mean, we're trying to transform finance, and finance is maybe the biggest knowledge work category on earth, 15% of GDP. Sure. We've seen crazy uptake over the last six months. I think what was happening in all of 2025 with software engineering and Claude Code and Cursor taking off, we've crossed the chasm in in finance, and I think we're seeing in investment banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, folks really starting to use these tools to be more productive, to make better investments, to reimagine how they do their work, and that's driving the investment. Yeah. I feel like

Speaker 1: if if you know, somebody woke up from a coma and they looked at your financials and they looked at your business, they'd be like this is the most incredible investment. I got to write the check. Right? But then there is this, like, looming cloud of, like, AGI, ASI steamrolled by lab. Right? So are you grappling with that? How do you talk to your investors about, like, the defensibility, the moats, the the go to market motion? Like what makes Rogo special over the really long term or are you just like AGI's fake?

Speaker 11: I mean, think if if you're not grappling with that stuff, no matter who you are, you you probably should be. You know, I I don't care even if your business is making plastic cups. Like, things are gonna change, and you need to be prepared. For us in particular, I think folks throw a lot of shade at the application layer. Of course. And I think rightly so in in some places. Right? If you can't provide incremental value to these models such that big enterprises want to work with you and trust you to transform their businesses, you should not exist. Right? Like that that you you know, it's a rising tide, and it keeps you honest about what is the quality of what you're creating. Yeah. For us, we actually see there's structural reasons for a vertical planner in finance. Okay. One is that if you are the biggest investment bank on earth, you wanna always be able to run the world's best models on top of your data, on top of all your workflows. Mhmm. And the reality right now is the model du jour, but three months ago with Gemini, twelve months ago felt like Chatuchiki was indomitable. Who knows what it'll be in twelve months? Yeah. In twenty four months, you might be able to use the Kimi models to do everything you want, and you don't need a token max on the Frontier Model Labs, and you want someone whose incentive is aligned with your business incentives, not just consuming tokens. Sure. And so there's some structural advantages. And then there's also things native to financial services that are just very deep and complex. Right? Like, financial services is collection of niches each with their own regulation, their own data, their own definition of good. Yeah. To think you can just have this big generic tool and do all of the work is is a little bit nonsensical.

Speaker 8: Yeah. You The you mentioned

Speaker 2: the the thing on token maxing, do you think it's possible that the application application layer layer emerges as like the basically, the the party that's aligned to the to the end customer to to keep costs in control, which like right now businesses are are not carrying around token relate you know, you're starting to see a few a few people pop up and say like, hey, we spent two, three times as much on tokens this month. Like, did we get two, three times as much value? That's starting to happen in the last like, call it month. But you can imagine over time businesses will just care, you know, if if tokens become a core expense to every business which I would expect happens, businesses will care a lot about optimizing that and so there's an opportunity for the for the application layer to be the aligned party that's saying like, the the the lab is not gonna necessarily tell you like when you should use this other model but we will because like our our incentives are aligned. You're gonna pay like, you know, you can you can figure that out in a number of ways.

Speaker 11: Yeah. No. I mean, many ways we can be a model broker and help you pick the best bottle for the best task. And that's in fact how one of our customers described us the other night. And imagine being a huge firm, and you have, you know, the GM of a division comes to you and says, I just hired, you know, a $100,000,000 worth of people over the past year. You'd be like, and what what did you guys get done? Like, what what needle did you move? Right? Like, when I saw Uber's CTO saying we already went through our, you know, Claude Code budget, it's like, To what to what end? You're gonna need people that can align token consumption with business value. And for us, maybe it's per deal. Maybe it's per fairness committee memo. Maybe it's per IC memo. You can actually think about how do we make sure that we are supercharging the things that are revenue generating for the org as opposed to anything else. Yeah. How do you think about deduplication

Speaker 1: of work? It feels like there's some organizations where you might have, like, two vibe coded dashboards that are identical, and it's just repeat work. But this has happened for generations. I'm sure going back to investment banks, there's five people that built the same DCF. They should have used a template. There were at one point templating companies. I think Catalyst was one that was focused on those financial models and trying to standardize them across the organization. Like how much of what you do on top of the cherry on top is, like, change management, organizational design, education, making sure people are reaching for the most efficient tool for the job because the tool's changing, like, every week?

Speaker 11: A a ton. I mean, a huge part of our value proposition is the kind of forward deployed banker motion where we can go on go in and say, hey, what are what is all the muscle memory you have on how you do your work? And how do we map that to what AI is capable of today? Mhmm. But if you hire Accenture to do that, or McKinsey, or Bain, well, guess what happens? You have to do it again in three months Yep. If the models are changing so quickly, and you kind of need to reinvent these processes on the fly. Yeah. The reason it's so important to an enterprise is, you know, imagine imagine if Elon Musk was also the president. I'm sure self driving would look different. He would be able to change the traffic laws and design full self driving to be far more efficient. Mhmm. You can't do that. So you need to design for existing traffic laws. Sure. If you're a large enterprise, you can also change the traffic laws. So you can change how your organization is structured and thinking about integrating these models in in far more kind of interesting pioneering ways. But it takes thought partners to do that. You have an you have a sales team. Right? Like individuals that are working with large banks to deploy the product, set up the customer for success. Correct?

Speaker 8: Yep. What does it take to succeed? I'd worried. I'd be worried.

Speaker 1: I don't know. I I I just want to know impressed. Like, what does it take to succeed when you're hiring a sales rep? Like, what background? What characteristics? What stands out where you're like, they're gonna succeed here versus another company that's, you know, selling software or something. Yeah. Like, what like like, what what really jumps out to you to get a job?

Speaker 11: Well, we do have this forward deployed banker, forward deployed investor role where we hire a ton of super smart, curious, ambitious folks from Wall Street Mhmm. Who want to get hands on with the technology. Sure. And because we have so much of that domain expertise, you can actually pair someone like that with, you know, a great enterprise seller that knows how to navigate organization, knows the politics of selling, knows what it means to be a strategic AE, and and you know, they can they can work well together. You do want people who are open minded and curious and creative, because it is changing so quickly. But my mental model is it's very hard to, you know what a good AE does is build relationships. Right? And and now, you know, with these tools, they don't need to focus on building the decks or the analysis or the pricing schedules as much, but they can spend more time taking clients to Knicks games or, you know, whatever else might be productive. And that that's hard to replace. That's why Josh Kushner bought the SF Giants.

Speaker 2: How any any like rumblings around big financial institutions like changing their early career hiring or the number of people that they're hiring? Is it is it flat? Is it down? Is it up?

Speaker 11: I mean people are very interested in how they create the next generation of deal makers and investors. They're like, if you're not doing you know, the modeling I used to do or the work that I used to do, how are you going to learn the job? I think every firm is rethinking how do you have this pipeline of senior MDs, of senior investors. Because if you if you don't have any more juniors, you are missing out on the folks who will be revenue generating in five to ten years. I think there's a lot of thoughtfulness around that. Mhmm. I think in terms of you know, thinking about the org as a whole, these are super ambitious institutions that want to win market share. And if you say to them, hey, a junior banker now can support four MDs instead of two, and you can now hire more MDs and enter new markets and compete more aggressively with your peers, That's typically the way these folks think. Yeah. But it's a spectrum. Yeah. That makes sense.

Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much, Jordy. Anything else? No. Very cool. Congrats on Thanks, the

Speaker 2: guys. I hear about Rogo every week from our friend Patrick O'Shaughnessy. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1: Fantastic sponsorship. He's been on an absolute tear. He has. Yeah. So Gotta go tune in. He's the man. Well, thank you so much for coming up show, Gabe. Good to see you. Team. Thanks to the team. We'll talk to you later. Goodbye. There's some good news. If you are a cow, if you're a cow and you're worried about privacy, Google has your back. Google Maps specifically has your back because if you're caught and you're if you're a cow on the side of the road and you're caught by one of the Google Street View cameras, Google will blur your face out. If you're a cow, that's good. That's good policy. That's don't be evil in work. Don't dox my cow. And cow Into account says thank you Google Maps. Anything else you want to touch on today?

Speaker 2: There's a I'm whole bunch more looking forward tomorrow.

Speaker 1: Tune in 11AM Pacific. We'll be there. Sharp. Connor McGregor also has the latest adventure. We'll dig into that later. Have a great day, everyone. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.