Sphinx, a new company focused on building artificial intelligence tools for data professionals, has officially launched with $9.5 million in seed funding. The investment round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and included support from other major firms such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Box Group, K5, and Impatient VC. In addition to institutional investors, Sphinx has attracted backing from influential figures in the tech and finance world, including Steve Cohen, Naveen Rao, and leaders from companies like Databricks, Windsurf, and Together AI.
The funding will be used to develop further Sphinx’s core product: an AI copilot explicitly designed for data scientists. Unlike many existing AI tools that focus on writing code or generating quick answers, Sphinx’s copilot is built to think more like a data scientist. It emphasizes statistical reasoning, pattern recognition, and model verification. This means it doesn’t just spit out results—it works through the data methodically, helping users build accurate representations and draw conclusions grounded in solid evidence.
One of the main reasons Sphinx stands out is its focus on the unique nature of data science work. While software development often follows a more linear path, data science tends to be exploratory and iterative. Data professionals spend a lot of time testing hypotheses, refining models, and searching for insights hidden in complex datasets. Sphinx’s copilot is designed to support this process, taking on some of the more tedious tasks and allowing data teams to focus on deeper analysis.
The copilot is already available and integrates directly into popular environments like Jupyter notebooks and Visual Studio Code. This makes it easy for data teams to start using it without changing their existing workflows. It can help with tasks such as refining forecasts, optimizing operations, and supporting specialized applications, including supply chain management and sports analytics.
Sphinx’s founders, Rohan Kodialam and Jamie Bloxham, bring deep experience in AI and data science. Rohan previously led AI research at Citadel, while Jamie was an early technology leader at MosaicML. Together, they recognized a significant gap in the way advanced AI models interact with structured data and the tools data scientists rely on. Their goal with Sphinx is to close that gap by combining cutting-edge research in representation learning and reinforcement learning with practical tools that make data work faster and more effectively.
The company is also building on recent breakthroughs in AI reasoning models, with a particular focus on interpreting tabular and semi-structured data. This kind of information is common in business settings, and being able to explore it efficiently and extract meaningful insights is a huge advantage. Sphinx is positioning itself to serve a massive market, with over 93 million Jupyter users worldwide and a growing demand for data-driven decision-making across industries.
Early adopters are already seeing results. For example, the team at Oats Overnight has utilized Sphinx to uncover patterns in customer behavior much faster than before, reducing hours or days of work to minutes. This kind of impact is exactly what Sphinx aims to deliver—helping companies make more intelligent decisions by unlocking the full potential of their data.
KEY QUOTES:
“Sphinx brings frontier AI capabilities to data analysis, redefining how AI reasons with data. Starting with the core workflows of data teams, Sphinx’s agents will continue to handle more of the tedious work that goes into deriving insights from data. It’s more critical than ever for enterprises to glean key information from their data to fuel business decisions and Sphinx enables this at record speed. Rohan and Jamie are on a mission to define how enterprises leverage AI to become truly data-driven.”
Bucky Moore, partner at Lightspeed
“AI is driving a paradigm shift for natural language and code, but traditional data has been left behind. Our researchers and engineers are aggressively innovating on the interface between AI and data to drive tangible value for our partners across industries including CPG, retail, and financial services.”
Rohan Kodialam, co-founder and CEO of Sphinx
“Sphinx has helped our data scientists uncover patterns in shopper behavior in minutes instead of hours or days. It’s become a powerful part of our analytics workflow, and we’re looking forward to deepening the partnership.”
Brian Tate, CEO of Oats Overnight
