Investor Patrick O'Shaughnessy released a segment of an interview with Rogo founder and CEO Gabe Stengel: despite the company raising over $300 million in total funding, around 40 institutions rejected the A round, with Keith Rabois being the only one to make the decision at that time.

Gabe stated that he met with almost all top-tier firms, including Sequoia, Kleiner, and Benchmark. The rejections were not just based on reviewing materials but involved meetings, one-on-one hours, investment committee discussions, meals, and even weekend chats, yet they still said no in the end. His judgment was that the rejection at that stage was directed at the founder himself.

Rabois got involved about a month after everyone else had rejected, at that time a partner at Khosla Ventures, questioning whether this was a reverse bet or just a "financial version of Harvey." Gabe countered: if the consensus was so clear, why did your friends all think it was a bad idea and not believe in me? In October 2024, Khosla led a $18.5 million A round, with Rabois joining the board, alongside participants like Jack Altman, Mantis VC, and BoxGroup, bringing total funding at that time to about $26 million.

Rogo was founded in New York by Gabe Stengel, John Willett, and Tumas Rackaitis. Gabe worked in investment banking at Lazard from 2020 to 2022, leaving at around 23 years old, and began coding at a dining table with Willett, who has a computer background from Princeton and was a former banker at JPMorgan, aiming to replace the repetitive tasks of analysts in building models, memos, and slides. He described the early product as very poor, with a fragile architecture of about 60 model call chains, which was later rebuilt each year as model capabilities improved.

Subsequent funding brought back names that had initially rejected them: in 2025, Thrive Capital led a $50 million B round, with JPMorgan Growth Equity, Tiger Global, and Positive Sum participating; in January 2026, Sequoia led a $75 million C round and opened a London office; in April of the same year, Kleiner Perkins led a $160 million D round, with a post-investment valuation of about $2 billion, bringing total funding to over $300 million. Public figures on the client side include over 35,000 financial professionals and more than 250 institutions, including Rothschild & Co, Jefferies, Lazard, Moelis, and Nomura. The new product Felix targets multi-agent processes for transaction screening, CIM writing, buyer outreach, and due diligence in data rooms.

The market structure is event-driven cognitive correction: during the A round, Silicon Valley lacked a sense of scale regarding financial infrastructures like Bloomberg, FactSet, PitchBook, and ION, viewing vertical scenarios as cheap imitations of legal AI; funding first flowed from Khosla, then back to Sequoia, Kleiner, Thrive, and bank strategic capital. The beneficiaries are Rogo, which captured the workflow entry point, and Rabois, who priced early, while the pressured parties are those who used "too much consensus" as a reason for rejection but later replenished positions at a $2 billion valuation in the D round.

Source: Public information