Junior Bankers Sick of Grunt Work Build an AI Tool to Do the Job

In a cramped Manhattan apartment in late 2021, three young investment bankers often toiled into the wee morning hours, crunching away on spreadsheets and rearranging logos on slide decks, while one of their roommates was taking a risk.

Gabriel Stengel had just quit his job at Lazard Inc. to team up with fellow Princeton University computer science graduate John Willett, a former JPMorgan Chase & Co. banker, so the pair could work fulltime around Stengel’s kitchen table on something else: coding an artificial intelligence tool that would take over that dealmaking drudgery.

John Willett, Gabe Stengel and Tumas Rackaitis, founders of Rogo Technologies

Photographer: Ben Sklar/Bloomberg

“A lot of the analytical work is ...