Exclusive: Rogo taps former Grammarly CTO for next growth phase
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Rogo, an AI startup creating software for Wall Street, has hired former Grammarly chief technology officer Joe Xavier as its CTO, the company tells Axios.
Why it matters: Rogo is tapping a Silicon Valley tech expert for its next growth phase on Wall Street.
Driving the news: Xavier joins Rogo after holding engineering leadership roles at Grammarly, Amazon, Twitter and Microsoft.
- His immediate priorities include staffing engineers, speeding product development and building what he calls an "AI-native" engineering organization built around small, highly autonomous teams.
- Xavier, who is based on the West Coast, will also help establish Rogo's first San Francisco office as the company expands its engineering footprint.
- "There's so much noise right now when you think about where to go and join…coming to Rogo felt like one of those kind of incredible opportunities to do something super meaningful," Xavier tells Axios.
Catch up quick: Rogo builds AI-powered software for investment banks, private equity firms and asset managers.
- Think help with automating research, analysis, dealmaking processes and other complex financial workflows.
- Rather than offering a general-purpose chatbot, Rogo helps financial professionals search internal knowledge, analyze financial data and outsource workflows to agents.
- The hiring comes as Rogo says its customer base and engineering organization are expanding rapidly, shifting the company's focus from building an early product to scaling it for hundreds of large enterprise customers.
Threat level: Every AI application company faces the same existential question right now: Will OpenAI, Anthropic or Google eventually build the same product?
- Rogo isn't worried: "If you're not working on a problem that's rich enough, complex enough, deep enough," you're at risk that the model providers can launch a plugin that eats your lunch, Rogo CEO Gabe Stengel tells Axios, adding that he doesn't see that happening in finance.
- Stengel points to the frontier labs' acquisitions of consulting firms and expansion of forward-deployed engineers as evidence that enterprises need more than access to AI models—they need help integrating them into complex workflows.
Follow the money: Rogo said that its annual recurring revenue grew more than 50% last quarter, though it declined to disclose the revenue number.
- The company raised a $160 million Series D in April led by Kleiner Perkins, with backing from Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners.
- More than 40,000 bankers and investors are on the platform.
