In the hype-filled world of AI startups, Rulebase is taking a decidedly unglamorous route: automating the back-office operations that keep financial institutions compliant and efficient. The Y Combinator-backed startup, founded in 2024 by Nigerian engineers Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, has secured a $2.1 million pre-seed round led by Bowery Capital with support from Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform VC, and several angel investors.
Tackling the Pain Points of Compliance
Financial institutions spend vast sums managing support tickets, disputes, and regulatory protocols. These are not the customer-facing AI chatbots that dominate headlines, but the unseen workflows that can make or break compliance. Rulebase’s flagship product, AI Coworker, is designed to automate these processes while keeping human oversight intact.
“We automate workflows that start with a customer interaction, areas we’re already great at handling end-to-end,” said CEO Ebose. “While much of that is QA, compliance, and disputes tied to customer calls and messages, our long-term goal is to take on as many manual back-office tasks as possible.”
The company’s early focus has been on quality assurance (QA). In traditional banks, QA analysts review just 3–5% of customer interactions for compliance checks. Rulebase evaluates 100% of interactions, reducing costs by as much as 70%. In the case of U.S. business banking platform Rho, the software cut customer escalations by 30%.
Deep Roots in Finance and Engineering
The Rulebase story didn’t begin here. Ebose, a former Microsoft product lead, and Williams, who worked as a backend engineer at Goldman Sachs, had experimented with several products, including an AI customer feedback tool, before settling on their current venture. Their eureka moment came from observing the inefficiencies in financial institutions’ regulatory workflows, both in small startups and global giants.
Rulebase’s AI Coworker integrates with tools like Zendesk, Jira, and Slack, coordinating fragmented processes into a single workflow. It evaluates customer interactions, flags regulatory risks, and initiates the appropriate follow-ups—all without sidelining human agents.
Why Financial Services First
Unlike consumer-facing AI experiments, Rulebase’s approach demands precision. “You need to understand MasterCard’s rules, CFPB timelines. That depth of domain knowledge is our moat,” said Ebose. That precision has made the startup appealing to neobanks, card issuers, and business banks in Africa, Europe, and the U.S.
For now, the company is doubling down on financial services, but its roadmap includes insurance and other heavily regulated verticals with similar workflows. The new funding will be channeled into expanding engineering teams and adding features such as fraud investigation, audit preparation, and regulatory reporting.
Growth and Global Ambition
Since joining Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 batch, Rulebase has seen double-digit month-over-month revenue growth. Its business model is usage-based, charging per interaction reviewed or workflow automated.
Williams, who previously built Buzz, an open-source speech-to-text tool downloaded over 300,000 times, emphasizes ambition as a key ingredient for founders seeking YC’s stamp of approval. “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,” he said.
For Ebose and Williams, Rulebase isn’t just another automation tool—it’s an attempt to redefine how compliance, QA, and disputes are handled across the financial world. By focusing on the dull but vital corners of financial operations, Rulebase is betting that the next AI revolution will be measured not in flashy chatbots, but in time saved, errors reduced, and regulations met.
