The next frontier of artificial intelligence in financial services may not be chatbots that talk like bankers or trading models that anticipate markets. Instead, Rulebase, a year-old Y Combinator graduate founded by two Nigerian engineers, argues the real transformation lies in automating the back-office drudgery: compliance checks, dispute resolution, and quality assurance.
Founded in 2024 by Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams — who met in London after stints at Microsoft and Goldman Sachs — Rulebase has just raised $2.1 million in pre-seed funding led by Bowery Capital, with support from Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform VC, and a roster of angel investors.
The startup pitches what it calls an “AI Coworker,” software that slips into tools like Zendesk, Jira, and Slack to monitor customer interactions, flag regulatory risks, and trigger follow-ups — without entirely removing the human in the loop.
“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,” said CTO Williams.
The promise is enticing: replace armies of quality assurance analysts who traditionally review just a fraction of customer interactions with a system that, according to the company, can analyze 100 percent of them and cut costs by as much as 70 percent. Rulebase says that at Rho, a U.S. business banking platform, its software reduced escalations by nearly a third.
But the broader question remains: if compliance and dispute management are already some of the most conservative, tightly regulated corners of finance, how realistic is it to expect startups to automate them at scale?
Ebose and Williams insist that their background gives them an edge. “We automate workflows that start with a customer interaction, areas we’re already great at handling end-to-end,” Ebose said. “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.”
That ambition now extends beyond quality assurance. With its new funding, Rulebase says it plans to add features like fraud investigation, audit preparation, and regulatory reporting. For Ebose, the painstaking details of regulation are the company’s moat: “You need to understand Mastercard’s rules, CFPB timelines. That depth of domain knowledge is our moat,” he said.
The company, which charges financial institutions per interaction reviewed or workflow automated, reports “double-digit” month-over-month revenue growth since joining Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 batch. Its initial market includes business banks, neobanks, and card issuers in Africa, Europe, and the U.S., but insurance and other sectors could follow.
That trajectory, however, raises another question: can a small team realistically master the nuances of multiple regulatory environments while competing with incumbents and larger AI firms moving into the same territory?
Williams insists that the scale of AI itself favors ambitious players. “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,” he said. “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.”
Rulebase is not the founders’ first attempt. Before this, they built tools including Buzz, an open-source speech-to-text program with more than 300,000 downloads and 12,000 GitHub stars. Whether their new software can succeed in financial services — a sector where regulators demand perfection and failure can carry steep penalties — remains to be seen.
For now, Rulebase is betting that the least glamorous tasks in banking may prove to be the most fertile ground for AI. The market will decide if that bet is realistic, or simply another optimistic pitch in an industry where hype has often outpaced delivery.