Let’s be real: when people hear AI in finance, they think of slick dashboards, trading bots, or shiny customer-facing apps. But Rulebase, a Y Combinator alum, has a different pitch — forget the flashy front-end, the real money leak is in the back-office grind: compliance, dispute resolution, and endless support tickets.
Founded by Nigerian engineers Gideon Ebose (ex-Microsoft) and Chidi Williams (ex-Goldman Sachs), the startup just bagged a $2.1M pre-seed round led by Bowery Capital, with Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform VC, and angel investors joining the party.
So what’s the big deal? Rulebase built an AI-powered “coworker” — not the annoying type that steals your snacks, but one that actually does the grunt work. This agent reviews customer interactions, checks for compliance risks, resolves disputes, and integrates directly with tools like Zendesk, Jira, and Slack. It’s like having a hyper-diligent junior analyst who never sleeps.
And the results? Impressive. Traditional QA teams in banks can only review 3–5% of interactions. Rulebase? It scans 100%, cutting costs by up to 70% and reducing escalations by 30% (shoutout to Rho, one of their early customers). Not bad for a startup that’s just a year old.
But Rulebase isn’t stopping at QA. With fresh funding, they’re expanding the “AI coworker” into fraud detection, audit prep, and regulatory reporting — basically becoming the Swiss Army knife of financial back-office automation. And since compliance rules (like Mastercard’s or the CFPB’s) don’t forgive mistakes, Rulebase’s moat is deep domain expertise + precision.
Their first targets? Business banks, neobanks, and card issuers across Africa, Europe, and the U.S. But insurance is also on the horizon — because let’s face it, insurance workflows are just as messy.
Fun fact: Ebose and Williams aren’t first-time builders. Before Rulebase, they experimented with AI customer feedback tools, and Williams even built Buzz, an open-source speech-to-text tool with 300k+ downloads. So yeah, they’ve been grinding.
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