Rulebase, a Y Combinator fintech AI startup, just closed $2.1 million to automate the unglamorous side of banking - quality assurance, compliance checks, and dispute resolution. The Nigerian-founded company is already cutting costs by 70% for clients including business banking platform Rho and a Fortune 50 financial institution.
Rulebase is betting big on the boring stuff. While everyone else chases flashy AI chatbots, the Y Combinator-backed startup just raised $2.1 million to tackle financial services' most tedious tasks - compliance audits, dispute resolution, and quality assurance reviews that typically eat up countless hours of human labor.
The pre-seed round, led by Bowery Capital with participation from Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, and Transpose Platform VC, comes as financial institutions scramble to automate back-office operations without sacrificing regulatory oversight. For founders Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams - two Nigerian engineers who met in London - it's validation that the real AI opportunity isn't customer-facing but buried deep in operations.
"Financial services firms spend enormous amounts of effort on support tickets, resolving disputes, ensuring quality assurance, and regulatory compliance," the company explains. Their "AI Coworker" integrates across platforms like Zendesk, Jira, and Slack to evaluate customer interactions, flag regulatory risks, and trigger follow-ups - all while maintaining the human oversight that banks demand.
The results speak volumes. Traditional QA analysts manually review just 3-5% of customer support interactions to ensure compliance protocols are followed. Rulebase now evaluates 100% of those interactions, slashing costs by up to 70% according to the founders. At Rho, the U.S. business banking platform, Rulebase has cut escalations by 30%.
"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," CTO Williams told TechCrunch. The year-old startup already counts an unnamed Fortune 50 financial institution among its clients.
This isn't the founders' first rodeo. Ebose, a former Microsoft product lead, and Williams, who cut his teeth as a backend engineer at , previously built several products including an AI customer feedback tool. The Rulebase idea crystallized after witnessing firsthand how inefficient back-office operations were across financial institutions of all sizes, particularly around regulatory workflows.
