Y Combinator-backed Rulebase wants to be the AI coworker for fintech

Rulebase, an innovative startup backed by Y Combinator, is setting its sights on transforming the automation landscape within financial services. Departing from the trend of flashy AI interfaces, the company is focusing on the essential yet often overlooked back-office operations such as compliance and quality assurance. Founded by Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, two Nigerian engineers who crossed paths in London, Rulebase has successfully secured a pre-seed funding round of $2.1 million, led by Bowery Capital, with additional contributions from Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, and Transpose Platform VC along with several angel investors. In the realm of financial services, firms expend significant resources on managing support tickets, resolving disputes, and ensuring compliance with regulations. Rulebase’s innovative software, referred to as an 'agent coworker,' is designed to streamline those labor-intensive tasks. The AI agent efficiently assesses customer interactions, identifies regulatory risks, and initiates appropriate follow-ups across platforms like Zendesk, Jira, and Slack, all while ensuring that human oversight remains intact. “Our 'Coworker' tool seamlessly integrates with existing platforms and collaborates with human agents and back-office teams to effectively handle the dispute lifecycle, ultimately saving time and minimizing errors while ensuring compliance,” stated CTO Chidi Williams. Despite being a newcomer, Rulebase has already garnered clients such as the U.S. business banking platform Rho and a major Fortune 50 financial institution. This isn’t the first venture for the founders, as both Ebose, a former product lead at Microsoft, and Williams, previously a backend engineer at Goldman Sachs, have collaborated on various products, including an AI-driven customer feedback tool before landing on Rulebase. The impetus for Rulebase arose from their observations of the inefficiencies plaguing back-office operations in both small and large financial institutions, particularly regarding regulatory workflows. The startup is currently honing in on workflows initiated by customer service interactions, with a focus on enhancing quality assurance. Traditionally, QA analysts in financial firms manually review only a fraction—around 3-5%—of support interactions to verify compliance with protocols. In contrast, Rulebase’s technology evaluates every single interaction, leading to cost reductions of up to 70%. For instance, the implementation of Rulebase at Rho has resulted in a 30% decrease in escalations. “We automate workflows that originate from customer interactions, leveraging our expertise to manage everything from start to finish,” CEO Gideon Ebose remarked in a discussion with TechCrunch. “While our current focus is on quality assurance, compliance, and dispute resolution tied to customer communications, our long-term vision is to tackle as many manual back-office tasks as possible by consolidating fragmented processes into a cohesive workflow.” The fresh funding will enable Rulebase to intensify its engineering efforts and introduce new features for its AI Coworker, including capabilities for fraud investigations, audit preparations, and regulatory reporting. For now, the startup is concentrating on the financial services sector due to the high precision required in automation. “Understanding the intricacies of MasterCard’s regulations and CFPB timelines is crucial. This depth of domain knowledge sets us apart,” Ebose emphasized. Targeting business banks, neobanks, and card issuers across Africa, Europe, and the United States, Rulebase is also eyeing potential expansion into related sectors such as insurance, which present similar operational workflows. The company reports accelerating revenue, showcasing double-digit month-over-month growth since joining Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 cohort. Rulebase operates on a usage-based business model, charging clients based on the number of interactions reviewed or workflows automated. As one of the few African founders to enter Y Combinator with a focus on AI technology, Ebose and Williams encourage aspiring entrepreneurs to adopt a global perspective from the outset. “In this era, small teams can deliver unprecedented value rapidly, so confining yourself to a narrow niche can be a missed opportunity,” Williams noted. “With AI, it’s imperative to pursue something substantial. Anything less than the most ambitious version of your vision is unlikely to succeed,” he concluded, reflecting on his prior experience building Buzz, an early open-source speech-to-text tool that garnered over 300,000 downloads and achieved more than 12,000 stars on GitHub.