Y Combinator-Alum Rulebase bets that the next wave of automation in financial services is not about flashy AI interfaces and not about attractive back-office tasks such as compliance.
Founded by two Nigerian engineers Gideon Evos and Chidi Williams, whom they met in London in 2024, the startup has raised a $2.1 million seed round led by Bowery Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Commerce Venture, Platform VC and several angels.
Financial services companies spend a great deal of effort on support tickets, disputes resolution, ensuring quality assurance and regulatory compliance. Rulebase software, called agent coworkers, replaces much of the manual groaning task with these tasks. Its AI agents can assess customer interactions, flag regulatory risks, and trigger appropriate follow-ups across tools such as Zendesk, Jira, and Slack.
“Our ‘co-workers’ tools are integrated across platforms and work with human agents and back-office teams to save time, reduce errors and maintain compliance while fully managing the lifecycle of conflict,” CTO Williams said. Now, the one-year-old startup has already been deployed to customers such as the US business banking platform Rho and the unnamed Fortune 50 Financial Institution.
Rulebase was not the founder’s first swing. Ebose, former Microsoft product lead, and Williams, former backend engineer at Goldman Sachs, built several products like AI’s customer feedback tools before finally settling down to Rulebase. This idea came after seeing how inefficient back office operations are inefficient at small and large financial institutions, particularly when it comes to regulatory workflows.
The startup is currently focusing on workflows triggered by customer service interactions, with the first wedge on quality assurance. QA analysts at traditional financial institutions typically manually review 3% to 5% of support interactions, ensuring that their personnel follow compliance protocols.
Rulebase now evaluates 100% of such interactions and reduces costs by up to 70%, the founder says. For example, for Rho, Rulebase helped reduce escalation by up to 30%.
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“We automate workflows that start with customer interactions. Areas are already good at end-to-end handling,” CEO Ebose said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Many of that is related to QA, compliance, and customer calls and messaging, but the long-term goal is to take on as many manual back-office tasks as possible by drawing these fragmented steps and tabs into a coordinated workflow.”
The new funding will double engineering and will ultimately help add new features to AI colleagues such as fraud investigations, audit preparation, and regulatory reporting.
Rulebase is currently focusing on financial services as it requires precision in automation. “We need to understand MasterCard rules, the CFPB timeline. The depth of domain knowledge is our moat,” says Ebose.
The company targets business banks, neobanks and card issuers in Africa, Europe and the US, but the roadmap can include adjacent verticals, such as insurance, where similar workflows exist.
The founder said revenue has been rising rapidly, with “double digits” monthly growth rates growing since joining Y Combinator’s fall 2024 batch. Rulebase’s business model is usage-based and automated per-interaction charging review or workflow.
As one of the few African founders to participate in YC Building AI Tools, our advice to founders looking to be embraced by the global accelerators of Ebose and Williams is to think globally from day one.
“We feel like we’ve either limited ourselves to “X for Y” or missed the opportunity in a narrow vertical, as we’re in a moment when a small team can bring value more quickly than ever before,” Williams said. “With AI, it’s clear that you have to chase after something huge. Less than the most ambitious version of your idea probably won’t cut it,” Rulebase created Buzz, an early open source speech-to-text tool with over 300,000 downloads and over 12,000 Github stars.
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