Funding and Founding Vision

Rulebase, a Y Combinator alum, announced the close of a $2.1 million pre‑seed financing round. The round was led by Bowery Capital and included participation from Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform VC and several angel investors. The startup was founded by Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, two Nigerian engineers who met in London. Ebose previously served as a product lead at Microsoft, while Williams worked as a backend engineer at Goldman Sachs. Their earlier collaborations included an AI‑driven customer‑feedback tool before they focused on back‑office automation for financial services.

Product Offering and Market Focus

Rulebase markets its software as an “agent coworker,” an AI‑powered assistant that automates the unglamorous but critical back‑office tasks that dominate financial‑service operations. The platform can evaluate customer interactions, flag regulatory risks and trigger appropriate follow‑ups across integrated tools such as Zendesk, Jira and Slack, while preserving a human‑in‑the‑loop oversight that regulators demand. Its initial wedge is around quality‑assurance workflows, where traditional institutions manually review a small percentage of support interactions. Rulebase now evaluates 100 % of those interactions, claiming cost reductions of up to 70 % and a reduction in escalations of up to 30 % for customers like Rho.

The company’s first customers include the U.S. business‑banking platform Rho and an unnamed Fortune 50 financial institution. Rulebase’s domain expertise—understanding MasterCard rules, CFPB timelines and other regulatory nuances—is described as a moat that differentiates it from generic automation tools. The firm targets business banks, neobanks and card issuers across Africa, Europe and the United States, and hints at future expansion into adjacent verticals such as insurance, where similar workflow challenges exist.

Growth, Business Model and Future Roadmap

Since joining Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 batch, Rulebase reports double‑digit month‑over‑month growth. Its usage‑based business model charges customers per interaction reviewed or workflow automated, aligning revenue with the value delivered. The new funding will be used to double down on engineering resources and to add new capabilities to the AI coworker, including fraud investigation, audit preparation and regulatory reporting. The founders see a long‑term opportunity to take on as many manual back‑office tasks as possible by consolidating fragmented steps into a coordinated workflow.

Beyond the product, Ebose and Williams advise other founders to think globally from day one and to pursue ambitious ideas, noting that small teams can now deliver significant value quickly with AI. Their experience building and scaling Rulebase underscores the belief that the next wave of fintech automation will be defined not by flashy interfaces but by reliable, compliance‑focused AI that works behind the scenes.

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