Rulebase, a London-based startup founded by Nigerian engineers Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, has raised $2.1 million in pre-seed funding to tackle a stubborn problem in financial services, which is inefficient back-office operations.
The round was led by Bowery Capital with backing from Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform VC, and several angel investors. For a company that launched just last year, this is a strong early validation of its focus on regulatory compliance and dispute resolution automation.
Unlike many startups chasing AI-driven customer interfaces, Rulebase has zeroed in on the unseen but critical tasks that financial institutions spend huge resources on, compliance checks, quality assurance, and dispute management.
Its flagship tool, Coworker, integrates with platforms like Zendesk, Jira, and Slack to monitor customer interactions, flag regulatory risks, and coordinate follow-ups without removing human oversight.
“Our ‘Coworker’ tool integrates across platforms and collaborates with human agents and back-office teams to fully manage the dispute lifecycle while saving time, reducing errors, and maintaining compliance,” said CTO Williams.
The product has already been adopted by Rho, a U.S. business banking platform, and even a Fortune 50 financial institution. At Rho, the system reportedly helped cut escalations by 30% and reduced quality assurance costs by as much as 70%.
The founders, who previously built tools including Buzz, an open-source speech-to-text project with over 300,000 downloads and 12,000 GitHub stars, say Rulebase emerged after witnessing firsthand how fragmented and manual back-office workflows slowed down financial operations.
Ebose, who was a product lead at Microsoft, and Williams, formerly at Goldman Sachs, experimented with other products before narrowing in on this problem.
Rulebase’s first focus is quality assurance in customer support interactions. Traditionally, financial institutions manually review only a small fraction of calls and messages to ensure compliance. By contrast, Rulebase reviews 100% of interactions automatically.
“We automate workflows that start with a customer interaction, areas we’re already great at handling end-to-end,” CEO Ebose explained. “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.”
While currently concentrating on banks, card issuers, and fintechs across Africa, Europe, and the U.S., the team sees potential in insurance and other regulated sectors with similar processes.
Revenue has been growing steadily, with “double-digit” month-on-month increases since joining Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 batch. Rulebase’s business model is usage-based, charging clients per interaction or workflow automated.
For Ebose and Williams, being among the few African founders building AI tools in Y Combinator brings both pride and perspective. Williams summed up their philosophy this way: “We’re in a moment where small teams can deliver more value, more quickly, than ever before, so limiting yourself to ‘X for Y’ or a narrow vertical feels like a missed opportunity. 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.”
The fresh funding will be channelled into engineering and expanding the Coworker’s capabilities, with plans to add features for fraud investigations, audits, and regulatory reporting.
For now, the startup is betting that the biggest profits in automation will come from fixing the invisible workflows that keep financial institutions running.
