John Willett says ChatGPT's November 2022 release was Rogo's biggest turning point, since before it the team avoided mentioning AI in sales decks.
Kevin Ryan, MongoDB and DoubleClick co-founder, became Rogo's first investor with $2m and told the founders to quit their banking jobs.
Rogo signed Lazard as its first real customer in December 2023, and now has over 5,000 bankers deployed across ten banks.
How Rogo Won the Biggest Banks After Years of Silence
Rogo spent years building AI for investment banks with almost no buyers, then ChatGPT and an embedded-team pitch to Lazard turned it into a vendor serving over 5,000 bankers. John Willett argues banks now see AI as a way to grow revenue, so adoption has become a strategy decision for senior leaders. Winning also meant adapting to how US and European banks buy.
Takeaways
Banks now treat AI as a revenue question. John argues AI is an existential revenue transformation for banks, not a cost-cutting cycle, and banks without an AI strategy put their whole business at risk. Rogo's discovery calls now sit with CIOs, COOs, CTOs or CEOs and cover overall strategy.
ChatGPT created demand years of effort could not. Before November 2022, Rogo avoided mentioning AI in sales decks. Barclays had five earlier automation tools that nobody used. Even after ChatGPT, commercializing took another year because of security and governance reviews.
An investor's push started the company. The founders had little urgency until Kevin Ryan offered $2m and told them to quit their jobs. The first year and a half then brought no client interest, and meetings with figures like Blair Efron kept them going.
Embedded engineers and ex-bankers won the first customer. Rogo pitched Lazard on teaching the models of the time to do financial tasks, with an engineering team and ex-banker staff working inside the bank every day. That hands-on model became the way in.
Big bank logos build trust but distract. Vidit cites Harvey's John Haddock calling prestige logos a proxy for trust. John agrees bulge bracket banks helped Rogo move down market, though serving them early meant bespoke feature requests that were a painful distraction.
US and European banks buy very differently. US banks run bake-offs with several vendors and often centralize procurement in New York. European banks pilot one or two tools because security review is slow and relationships matter, so Rogo builds local teams with legal, compliance and security staff.
Rogo's path from prototype to scale
After senior year, John and Gabe build a command-line prototype on structured data, with no language models.
They work in banking for about a year and a half, often eighty to ninety hour weeks, then go full time.
ChatGPT launches in November 2022, and commercialization takes another year.
Lazard signs in December 2023 and rolls out in 2024 to about 1,500 daily users. A Series A follows around August 2024.
Rogo now has over 5,000 bankers across ten banks, and headcount has grown from about 40 to about 200 in a year.
Tap a name to go there · tap a line to see why they are linked