Rowspace Announces its Launch with $50 Million in Backing

Rowspace, the best way for investors to scale their edge with AI, led by Michael Manapat and Yibo Ling, has announced its launch with $50M in backing from Sequoia, Emergence, Stripe, Conviction, Basis Set, Twine, and angels from across finance.

Top investors build an edge over the years through institutional knowledge, memos, models, committee notes, emails, deal histories, and trading data, which captures what worked, what didn’t, and why. At most firms, this knowledge is scattered, messy, and locked behind strict security and compliance controls, making it difficult for AI tools to extract or scale.

Rowspace tackles this challenge, enabling firms to rapidly drive AI transformation. With public data increasingly commoditized, maintaining a competitive edge requires scaling the judgment and insight embedded in proprietary data.

Rowspace focuses on three steps: map a firm’s siloed data, model and reconcile it into a layer of judgment, and feed that intelligence into key decision workflows. In finance, precision is critical, plausible answers aren’t enough, and even small errors, like miscalculating EBITDA addbacks, carry high stakes.

How Rowspace Drives Better Decisions

Rowspace helps leading financial institutions leverage institutional knowledge to answer complex questions and build trusted AI workflows. Examples include:

• Credit monitoring: One of the world’s largest credit originators tracks portfolio health in real time. Rowspace reconciles positions, ratings, indentures, and agreements, flagging covenant risks, OC test pressure, and negative credit migration, and recommends actions based on full context.

• Private equity insights: A PE firm accelerates deal conviction by learning from decades of transactions. Rowspace synthesizes past underwriting outcomes, recurring risks, and predictive patterns, replacing laborious file and partner searches.

• Crossover fund clarity: A leading fund gains a single trusted view across hundreds of companies and funds. Rowspace reconciles metrics and commentary with internal data, ensuring teams know exactly what happened and the right next steps.

How Rowspace Works

• Seamless deployment: Integrates into your environment, mapping data where it lives, resolving inconsistencies, and restructuring it for core workflows while keeping full control.

• Connects existing systems: Works with Snowflake, AzureSQL, Salesforce, DealCloud, VDRs, SharePoint, Allvue, WSO, and more.

• Creates structure: Processes covenant terms, builds clean timelines, and refines definitions and schemas to clarify decisions.

• Tracks lineage and resolves conflicts: Every output traces back to its source, with team feedback improving understanding over time.

• Delivers results everywhere: Outputs flow to chat, dashboards, Excel, Slack, Teams, or custom agents, enhancing workflows without changing them.

  
  

Why This Matters

AI has immense potential, but requires a “nervous system” to gather signals across an organization to be truly transformative.

Michael’s experience includes building systems that reason over messy, high-stakes data at Stripe and unifying context across tools at Notion, applied to finance, where correctness is critical.

Yibo brings expertise as a former CFO who ran an investment organization, providing insight into the technological and financial constraints enterprises face.