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 the chatbot 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 $50 million in funding across a previously unannounced seed round led by Sequoia and a Series A co-led by Sequoia and Emergence Capital, with participation from Basis Set Ventures, Stripe, and Conviction, along with other firms and angel investors.
