Rulebase Raises $2.1M to Revolutionize Financial Services Back-Office Automation with AI-Powered ‘Coworker’ Tool
Financial technology startup Rulebase, founded by Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, two engineers from Nigeria, has secured a $2.1 million pre-seed funding round. The investment was led by Bowery Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform VC, and several angel investors.
Rulebase aims to revolutionize the financial services sector by focusing on the unglamorous yet crucial back-office tasks, such as compliance, quality assurance, dispute resolution, and support ticket management. The startup’s software, dubbed an ‘agent coworker’, automates these tasks, integrating across platforms like Zendesk, Jira, and Slack, while maintaining the human oversight demanded by financial firms.
The company’s CTO, Chidi Williams, explained, “Our ‘Coworker’ tool integrates across platforms and collaborates with human agents and back-office teams to manage the entire dispute lifecycle, saving time, reducing errors, and maintaining compliance.” Rulebase is currently deployed at customers such as U.S. business banking platform Rho and a Fortune 50 financial institution that remains unnamed.
Before founding Rulebase, Ebose and Williams developed several products together, including an AI customer feedback tool. They identified the inefficiencies in back-office operations, particularly in regulatory workflows, within both small and large financial institutions as an opportunity for automation.
Currently, Rulebase focuses on workflows triggered by customer service interactions, with a primary focus on quality assurance. In traditional financial institutions, QA analysts manually review 3-5% of support interactions to ensure compliance protocols are followed. Rulebase, however, evaluates 100% of such interactions, potentially cutting costs by up to 70%. At Rho, for instance, the startup has helped reduce escalations by up to 30%.
CEO Ebose stated in an interview that Rulebase automates workflows starting with a customer interaction and aims to handle as many manual back-office tasks as possible. While much of this is currently QA, compliance, and dispute resolution related to customer calls and messages, the long-term goal is to expand into other areas.
The new funding will be used to bolster engineering efforts and add features like fraud investigation, audit preparation, and regulatory reporting to the AI Coworker. Given the precision required in automation within the financial services sector, Rulebase currently focuses on business banks, neobanks, and card issuers across Africa, Europe, and the U.S. However, the roadmap could potentially include adjacent sectors like insurance, where similar workflows exist.
Since joining Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 batch, Rulebase has experienced double-digit month-over-month growth in revenue. The company operates on a usage-based business model, charging per interaction reviewed or workflow automated.
As African founders building AI tools, Ebose and Williams advise aspiring global accelerator participants to think globally from the outset. “We’re in a moment where small teams can deliver more value, more quickly than ever before,” said Williams. “With AI, it feels obvious that you have to go after something massive. Anything less than the most ambitious version of your idea likely won’t cut it.” Before Rulebase, Williams developed Buzz, an early open-source speech-to-text tool with over 300,000 downloads and over 12,000 GitHub stars.
