y combination aluminum Rulebase The bet is that the next wave of automation in financial services is not about flashy AI interfaces, but smart-free backend tasks such as compliance.
Founded by two Nigerian engineers, Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, who met in London, the startup just raised a $2.1 million preplanting round led by Bowery Capital, with Y Combinator, Commisce Ventures, Transpose Platform Platform VC, along with several angels.
Financial services companies spend a lot of effort on supporting votes, resolving disputes, ensuring quality assurance and regulatory compliance. Rulebase’s software, called agent colleagues, replaced many of the manual Gunt works in these tasks. Its AI agent can assess customer interactions, mark regulatory risks, and trigger proper follow-up of tools like Zendesk, Jira, and Slack without losing the human supervision required by financial companies.
“Our ‘co-workers’ tools integrate across platforms and work with human agents and backend teams to fully manage the dispute life cycle while saving time, reducing errors and maintaining compliance,” said Williams, CTO. Currently, the year-old startup has been deployed in clients such as the U.S. commercial banking platform Rho and the unnamed Fortune 50 financial institution.
Rulebase is not the founder’s first swing. Ebose is a former product leader at Microsoft and Williams, a front-end engineer at Goldman Sachs, building several products together, such as AI customer feedback tools before eventually settling on Rulebase. The idea is after seeing inefficiency in back-end operations in small and large financial institutions, especially in regulatory workflows.
The startup currently focuses on workflows triggered by customer service interactions, which involves quality assurance for the first time. Quality inspection analysts in traditional financial institutions will typically manually review 3-5% of support interactions to ensure sales reps follow compliance protocols.
The founders say Rulebase now evaluates 100% of such interactions, reducing costs by up to 70%. For example, in terms of RHO, Rulebase has helped reduce upgrades by 30%.
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“We automate workflows that we start with customer interactions and we already excel in end-to-end processing areas,” CEO Ebose said in an interview with TechCrunch. “While most of this is quality checks, compliance and controversies related to customer calls and messages, our long-term goal is to take on as many manual backend tasks as possible by pulling these fragmented steps and tags into a coordinated workflow.”
The new funding will help it double engineering and eventually add new features to AI colleagues such as fraud investigations, audit preparation and regulatory reporting.
Because automation requires precision, Rulebase is currently focusing on financial services. “You need to understand the rules of Mastercard, the CFPB schedule. The depth of domain knowledge is our moat,” Ebos said.
Their companies target commercial banks, new banks and card issuers across Africa, Europe and the United States, but the roadmap may ultimately include adjacent verticals like insurance that exists in similar workflows.
The founder said revenue is growing rapidly since joining Y Combinator’s fall 2024 batch, with “double bits” growing for a month. Rulebase’s business model is based on usage-based, charging per interaction or automated workflow.
As one of the few African founders who entered YC to build AI tools, Ebose and Williams’ advice to the founders of trying to be accepted as global accelerator is to think globally from day one.
“We can deliver more value moments faster than ever in small teams, so limiting ourselves to ‘x for y’ or narrow verticals feels like a missed opportunity,” Williams said. “With AI, it’s obvious that you have to go after a lot of stuff. Less than the most ambitious version of the idea.
