Corrie Aune for BIYoung bankers are facing a new choice.Wall Street has traditionally offered a clear, if grueling, career path for junior employees: get an internship, work in investment banking for two years, and decide whether to stay in banking, move to the buy side, or get an MBA. AI is now disrupting not only the day-to-day nature of the work, but also potentially opening a new fork in the finance career road, as some young financiers flock to AI startups for financial firms.Jared Swansen, 27, made the jump to Rogo, one of those startups, in January. He's since forgotten all the Excel shortcuts he used as a banker and investor, now that the hours he spent typing away are instead spent on the phone with people he used to sit across from, teaching them how to cut the drudgery out of dealmaking."The holy grail was to go to the buy side. That was everyone's dream," Swansen, who spent around three years at Bank of America before moving to a small buy-side firm, said. "It was exactly what I had hoped, doing all the analysis and working on the different transactions that I hoped to when I was starting out my banking career. But it was hard to not see what was happening with AI."Jared Swansen worked as an investment banker and buy-side investor before Rogo.Corrie Aune for BIRogo was founded in 2021 by former investment bankers in their twenties from Lazard and JPMorgan and has secured a $2 billion valuation after its Series D fundraising round in April. It touts domain expertise as a big draw, since the workforce is predominantly split between engineers and former financiers like Swansen. According to employees' LinkedIn profiles, they hail from Evercore, Goldman Sachs, and Citi, among other firms.Rogo's leadership doesn't expect or want all bankers or private-market investors to suddenly jump ship to join a startup — that reality would erode their client base. Recruiters who work in finance aren't seeing a mass exodus among younger employees, though they said that AI is becoming an increasingly attractive option for the more entrepreneurially minded. Yet leaving the well-charted, lucrative finance road comes with its risks."It comes down to how common and how broad-based this is. It's hard to quantify," Anthony Keizner, co-founder of recruiting firm Odyssey Search Partners, said.Rogo has more than 300 clients, including Lazard, Moelis, and Tiger Global, and automates much of the tedious work, like making slide decks, producing research, and building models. Users can email instructions to its AI agent, Felix, the same way they do colleagues.There are other players in the vertical AI-for-finance space. Competitors like Hebbia and Farsight AI also promise to speed up work, and large AI labs, including Anthropic and OpenAI, are hiring bankers to work on services for financial firms.Rogo is something of a tech-finance mashup — former bankers walk around in jeans and enjoy daily free lunch, while engineers grind out finance hours in conference rooms named "Dimon" and "Soros." When asked whether they work at a finance or tech company, the four employees interviewed for this piece paused, before Elsa McLean, the head of talent, eventually settled on "an AI company."In addition to the ping pong table, Rogo's office in Manhattan has board games and an Xbox.Corrie Aune for BIMcLean, 30, said she's stopped having to educate potential recruits about what the Rogo does, and has seen a "massive uptick in inbound applications" starting in the first half of this year. The company has doubled its headcount in the past year to more than 150, and plans to double it again within the next 12 months. It has offices in New York and London, with plans to open locations in San Francisco and Singapore.Hebbia was founded in 2020 and has clients in investing, banking, and the broader deal ecosystem, including law. It's also seen rapid growth: the startup has around 200 employees, compared to just shy of 100 a year ago. Tom Navin, the head of people, said that monthly inbound applications have nearly tripled this year to an average of 7,000, and around 60% of employees have a background in finance.Swansen "caught the bug" for the finance industry during his senior year of high school, and expected to chart a traditional career. He first discovered Rogo while working as an investor at Acacia Research, and though leaving wasn't easy, the idea of being at the center of technological transformation was more exciting.Rachel Friedman, 27, wasn't letting go of her preconceived future when she came to Rogo as one of eight employees and the first woman. She spent more than two years at Jefferies as an investment banker and knew she didn't want to stay in finance, though she's glad she started there.Rachel Friedman joined Rogo when there were only eight employees.Corrie Aune for BIFor her, Rogo was more about joining an interesting, fast-paced place where she could play any part, with the added perk of swapping her trousers for the occasional swe
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