Rulebase, a Y Combinator-backed startup founded in 2024 by Nigerian engineers Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, is poised to revolutionize the financial services sector by automating the often-overlooked yet critical back-office tasks, particularly compliance. The company recently secured $2.1 million in pre-seed funding, led by Bowery Capital, with significant contributions from Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform VC, and various angel investors.

Financial institutions typically allocate substantial resources to managing support tickets, resolving disputes, ensuring quality assurance (QA), and maintaining regulatory compliance. Rulebase's innovative software, which it terms an 'agent co-worker,' is designed to streamline these labor-intensive processes. This AI-powered agent can meticulously evaluate customer interactions, proactively flag potential regulatory risks, and orchestrate the necessary follow-ups across diverse tools like Zendesk, Jira, and Slack. Crucially, the system is built to integrate seamlessly while preserving the essential human-in-the-loop oversight that is non-negotiable in financial operations.

CTO Chidi Williams emphasized the tool's capability: “Our ‘Coworker’ tool integrates across platforms and collaborates with human agents and back-office teams to fully manage the dispute life cycle while saving time, reducing errors, and maintaining compliance.” The startup, though only a year old, has already deployed its solution at prominent clients, including the U.S. business banking platform Rho and a confidential Fortune 50 financial institution.

The genesis of Rulebase stemmed from the founders’ prior experiences. Ebose, a former product lead at Microsoft, and Williams, who previously served as a back-end engineer at Goldman Sachs, had collaborated on several products before Rulebase. Their shared observation of the profound inefficiencies in back-office operations across financial institutions, particularly concerning regulatory workflows, solidified their focus. Rulebase initially concentrates on workflows initiated by customer service interactions, with its primary entry point being quality assurance. Traditionally, QA analysts in financial institutions manually review only 3% to 5% of support interactions to ensure compliance protocols are met. Rulebase's solution dramatically improves this by evaluating 100% of such interactions, leading to reported cost reductions of up to 70%. For instance, at Rho, Rulebase has been instrumental in cutting escalations by as much as 30%.

CEO Gideon Ebose explained the company's strategic approach: “We automate workflows that start with a customer interaction, areas we’re already great at handling end-to-end. While much of that is QA, compliance, and disputes tied to customer calls and messages, long-term our goal is to take on as many manual back-office tasks as possible by pulling these fragmented steps and tabs into one coordinated workflow.” The newly secured funding will be channeled into bolstering engineering efforts and developing new features for the Rulebase AI Coworker, such as fraud investigation, audit preparation, and comprehensive regulatory reporting.

Rulebase's initial focus on financial services is strategic, driven by the sector's demand for unparalleled precision. “You need to understand Mastercard’s rules, CFPB timelines. That depth of domain knowledge is our moat,” Ebose stated. The company is targeting business banks, neobanks, and card issuers across key markets including Africa, Europe, and the U.S. While financial services remain the core, the long-term roadmap envisions expanding into adjacent verticals like insurance, where similar operational workflows exist.

The company is experiencing rapid growth, reporting