# Rohan Kodialam

> Rohan Kodialam is the co-founder and CEO of Sphinx, a New York applied-AI research firm building agents that actually understand data. A former Citadel quant who learned to squeeze alpha out of messy alternative datasets, and an MIT-trained researcher who once taught transformers to read hierarchical data, he started Sphinx on a simple observation: software engineers got Copilot, everyone else got ChatGPT, and data scientists got nothing. In 2025 Sphinx launched out of stealth with a $9.5M seed led by Lightspeed and backers including Steve Cohen and Naveen Rao, betting that the next frontier of AI is not language or code, but the spreadsheets and warehouses where real decisions get made.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at Sphinx
- **Organizations:** Sphinx, Citadel, MIT CSAIL, MIT Clinical ML
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** B.S. in Physics and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MEng, working with the Clinical ML group (advisor: David Sontag), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AI/ML research on embedding hierarchical data modalities into transformer architectures, MIT CSAIL
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads Sphinx, raising a $9.5M seed round led by Lightspeed within the company's first year, Recruited backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, BoxGroup, K5, Impatient Ventures, Steve Cohen and Naveen Rao, Led AI R&D for agentic alpha-generation models at Citadel

## Career timeline

- **2018-2019** — MIT SuperUROP scholar in Physics, advised by Alexander Rakhlin; researched optimal algorithms for ski rental with machine-learned predictions
- **2020** — Completed MEng thesis on deep patient-level clinical outcome prediction with the MIT Clinical ML group; co-authored 'Deep Contextual Clinical Prediction with Reverse Distillation'
- **2020s** — Quantitative researcher at Citadel, specializing in alternative-data strategies; later led AI R&D building agentic models for alpha generation
- **2025** — Co-founded Sphinx with Jamie Bloxham; serves as CEO
- **2025-09** — Sphinx launches out of stealth with a $9.5M seed round led by Lightspeed

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads Sphinx, raising a $9.5M seed round led by Lightspeed within the company's first year
- Recruited backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, BoxGroup, K5, Impatient Ventures, Steve Cohen and Naveen Rao
- Led AI R&D for agentic alpha-generation models at Citadel
- Published peer-reviewed clinical machine learning research while at MIT
- Shipped the Sphinx Copilot into Jupyter and VSCode for data practitioners

## Latest updates

- **2025-09** — Sphinx emerged from stealth with $9.5M in seed funding led by Lightspeed to build AI agents for data science.
- **2025-09** — Appeared on the SuperDataScience podcast (episode 938) discussing frontier AI agents for data science.
- **2025-10** — Shipped a new 'AI for AI' capability in the Sphinx Copilot and demoed it on famous books.

## Links

- Website: https://sphinx.ai
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rohan-kodialam-31b5a9234
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/KodialamRo
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGbXqD6KHiI

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/rohan-kodialam
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-21