Rowspace, an AI platform that accelerates financial services firms’ decision making based on their proprietary data, launched this week with $50 million in funding across a Series A co-led by Sequoia and Emergence Capital and a seed round led by Sequoia. Stripe, Conviction, Basis Set, Twine, and angels from across finance participated in both rounds.
Rowspace connects structured and unstructured data across a firm’s entire history then applies a finance-native lens that reflects how that firm reconciles information, interprets discrepancies, and makes decisions. The company scales and accelerates the application of the firm’s judgment to its most data-intensive work—and delivers it wherever teams already operate, whether through Rowspace’s own interface, within tools like Excel and Teams, or directly into a firm’s existing data infrastructure.
“Finance is full of high-stakes decisions. There used to be a tradeoff between moving quickly and making fully informed, nuanced decisions using all the possible data at a firm’s disposal. Our AI platform eliminates that tradeoff,” said Michael Manapat, co-founder and CEO of Rowspace. “We’re building specialized intelligence that turns a firm’s data into scalable judgment with the rigor finance demands.”
“I’ve lived this problem,” added co-founder Yibo Ling. “As a former CFO who’s managed a major investment portfolio, I’ve made decisions by synthesizing data across fragmented systems. Most tech tools aren’t comprehensive or nuanced enough for finance. And most finance tools need to raise their technical ceiling. We intend to do both.”
“Michael built the machine learning systems at Stripe that process billions of transactions and helped drive Notion’s expansion into AI. Yibo has been a finance leader and investor who’s wrestled with the exact challenges Rowspace is solving,” said Alfred Lin, who led the investment for Sequoia. “They’ve seen the problem from both sides, pairing technical depth with firsthand understanding of what customers actually need. That combination is rare.”
“We back founders who bring lived experience to big, enterprise goals—basically the definition of the Rowspace team,” said Jake Saper, general partner at Emergence Capital. “They’re doing the previously impossible work of connecting proprietary data, and reconciling and reasoning over it with real rigor. Without this foundation, it doesn’t matter what other AI tools you’re using.”
“Imagine a firm that never forgets,” said Manapat. “Where an experienced investor’s workflows—touching many different tools in specific ways—can be codified and multiplied. When that’s possible, a first-year analyst can tap into decades of institutional knowledge, and judgment scales with a firm instead of being diluted. That’s what we’re building.”
Rowspace deploys directly into customer environments, so data never leaves their control. Stringent security around a firm’s most important asset—its data—has been a design principle from the start. This is the foundation that allows the most exacting firms in the world to fully lean into the AI era and compound their advantage over time.
