Rowspace, an AI platform built to accelerate decision-making inside financial services firms using their own proprietary data, officially launched today with $50 million in funding. The capital includes a Series A round co-led by Sequoia and Emergence Capital, along with a seed round led by Sequoia. Additional backing came from Stripe, Conviction, Basis Set, Twine, and a group of angel investors from across the finance sector.
The company is tackling a long-standing challenge within institutional finance: judgment that has been built over decades often remains locked inside scattered systems. Investment memos, financial models, accounting platforms, emails and legacy databases collectively contain immense institutional knowledge, yet much of it remains fragmented and difficult to operationalize in real time.
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Rowspace connects both structured and unstructured data across a firm’s historical records, including document repositories, investment and accounting systems, and broader data infrastructure. It then applies what it describes as a finance-native intelligence layer that mirrors how the firm reconciles information, interprets discrepancies and ultimately makes decisions. The platform embeds directly into existing workflows, whether through its own interface, inside tools such as Excel and Microsoft Teams, or directly within a firm’s internal data infrastructure.
Michael Manapat, Co-founder and CEO of Rowspace, said financial decision-making has traditionally required a tradeoff between speed and completeness. According to Manapat, the company’s AI platform eliminates that compromise by transforming proprietary data into scalable institutional judgment while maintaining the rigor demanded in high-stakes financial environments.
The platform is already being used by firms managing hundreds of billions to nearly a trillion dollars in assets. These institutions rely on Rowspace for portfolio monitoring, deep analysis across decades of deal data and credit portfolio optimization. The company says customers turned to its solution after finding that general-purpose AI tools lacked the precision and reliability required for complex financial decision-making.
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Yibo Ling, Co-founder and COO of Rowspace, brings firsthand experience to the problem. As a former CFO responsible for managing a major investment portfolio, Ling experienced the difficulty of synthesizing insights across fragmented systems. He noted that most technology tools fail to capture the nuance of financial reasoning, while many legacy finance tools struggle to evolve technically. Rowspace aims to bridge that gap.
The founding team’s background has drawn strong support from investors. Alfred Lin of Sequoia, who led the firm’s investment, highlighted Manapat’s experience building machine learning systems at Stripe that process billions of transactions, as well as his role in driving AI expansion at Notion. Lin also pointed to Ling’s leadership in finance and investment, describing the combination of technical depth and lived financial expertise as rare.
Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital, emphasized that Rowspace’s work in reconciling and reasoning over proprietary data with rigor creates a foundation without which other AI tools cannot deliver meaningful enterprise value.
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Rowspace envisions a future where institutional memory is never lost. A private equity firm evaluating a new deal can draw on decades of historical insight in real time. A growth investor making allocation decisions can rely on reconciled, up-to-date data rather than waiting weeks for reporting cycles. Credit investors can surface opportunities aligned with macro strategies while ensuring compliance requirements are satisfied at both the loan and portfolio levels.
Manapat describes the company’s ambition simply: to help firms scale judgment instead of diluting it. By codifying experienced investor workflows and embedding them into AI systems, Rowspace enables even junior analysts to tap into decades of institutional expertise.
Security has been central to the platform’s architecture from the outset. Rowspace deploys directly within customer environments, ensuring proprietary financial data remains fully under the firm’s control.
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