Exclusive: AI financial platform Rowspace raises $50 million round led by Sequoia to help investment firms take on messy data

After meeting in graduate school at MIT, Michael Manapat and Yibo Ling embarked on different career paths. Manapat held chief technical roles at Stripe and Notion, while Ling led finance teams at Uber and Binance. Still, they both confronted a similar challenge: How to assemble fragmented data to make important decisions about capital allocation, workflows and more.

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, Ling tested to see how well it could carry out basic due diligence tasks. He quickly found the new AI tool was hampered by a familiar problem: Data. “Clearly there was a lot of promise, but it just wasn’t working. You need the right information in the right context,” he told Fortune. 

That realization motivated Manapat and Ling to join forces to build Rowspace, an AI platform that allows financial outfits like private equity firms and hedge funds to turn their years of proprietary data into alpha. The company is publicly launching today with a $50 million funding round led by Sequoia, with participation from Emergence Capital, Stripe, and Conviction, along with other firms and angel investors. 

At a time of pearl-clutching and market turmoil on whether large language models and foundation models will render software obsolete, Sequoia investor and co-steward........

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