Rulebase Bags $2.1 Million in Pre-Seed Funds to Build AI Agents for Back Office Operations in Financial Services

Rulebase, a YC-backed AI start-up building an AI agent for back-office operations at Financial Services led by Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, has secured $2.1 million in pre-seed funding led by Bowery Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform VC, alongside several angels.

Financial services firms spend huge resources on support, dispute resolution, QA, and compliance. Rulebase addresses this with its “agent coworker,” an AI system that reviews customer interactions, flags regulatory risks, and triggers follow-ups across tools like Zendesk, Jira, and Slack—while keeping the necessary human oversight in place.

Just a year after launch, the startup is already live with customers, including U.S. business banking platform Rho and a Fortune 50 financial institution.

Founded by ex-Microsoft product lead Ebose and ex-Goldman Sachs engineer Williams, Rulebase was born from their experience with back-office inefficiencies in financial institutions. The startup focuses on automating regulatory workflows in customer service, starting with QA, where analysts typically review just 3–5% of interactions manually. Rulebase now reviews 100% of customer interactions, reducing costs by up to 70%. At Rho, it has also lowered escalations by 30%.

The new funding will fuel engineering growth and expand AI Coworker with features like fraud investigation, audit prep, and regulatory reporting. Rulebase is targeting business banks, neobanks, and card issuers across Africa, Europe, and the U.S., with plans to eventually expand into adjacent sectors like insurance.

Revenue has grown at double-digit rates month-over-month since Rulebase joined YC’s Fall 2024 batch. Its usage-based model charges per interaction reviewed or workflow automated. As two of the few African founders in YC building AI tools, Ebose and Williams advise aspiring applicants to “think globally from day one.”