Everett Cook is co-founder and chief executive of Rho, the New York company that calls itself a financial operating system for growing businesses. He started Rho in 2018 with Alex Wheldon after about a decade in investment management and macro analysis, including roles at Point72, Taylor Woods, Atreaus, and The Tudor Group, and he studied international economics at Vanderbilt University.
From markets to business banking
Before Rho he spent roughly ten years on the buy side analysing markets and portfolios. That background pushed him toward the operational money problems companies face every day: opening accounts, moving cash, paying vendors, and controlling spend when the tools were fragmented. Cornell Tech and Bloomberg have featured him discussing Rho as a new category that sits above single-purpose banking or card products.
Building Rho
He and Wheldon launched the company when opening a business bank account online was still hard and tech-forward commercial banking was thin. Rho expanded from business banking into corporate cards, accounts payable, treasury, and expense tools on one platform. In July 2024 Cook announced a $75 million Series B led by Dragoneer Capital and DFJ Growth, writing that every feature came from CFOs and finance teams who needed better coordination of people and process around money.
"We started Rho in 2018 with the objective to build a financial services platform that could truly help make companies smarter, faster, and realize more of their potential," he wrote in that Series B note.