Rulebase, a fintech startup founded by Nigerian engineers Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, has recently raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Bowery Capital. Some of the most high-profile investors participated in the round as well, including Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures and Transpose Platform VC. Many angel investors joined this round as well. The capital will allow Rulebase to further enforce its unique method of automating workflows in the financial services industry.
The startup focuses on providing innovative, AI-enabled solutions for quality assurance to financial institutions. This impacts its usage-based business model that powers the organization. For consulting work, it charges clients per interaction reviewed or workflow automated. Rulebase increases productivity by empowering legacy banking infrastructures. Quality assurance analysts typically sample only 3-5% of support interactions, enough to make sure the company isn’t violating any regulations in bad faith.
Since joining Y Combinator’s current Fall 2024 batch, Rulebase has been on an amazing growth trajectory, sustaining double-digit month-over-month revenue growth. Ebose and Williams met in London as AI tools—mostly research prototypes—were being created. Today, they are focused on creating a scalable software solution for improving the quality and efficiency of customer service interactions.
That’s because unlike other solutions, Rulebase can evaluate 100% of interactions – allowing financial institutions to reduce operational costs by 70%. Their software, referred to as an agent coworker, effectively replaces much of the manual labor involved in quality assurance tasks. This strategy gives businesses the ability to manage customer touchpoints with more accuracy and productivity.
Ebose elaborated on Rulebase’s mission, stating, “We automate workflows that start with a customer interaction, areas we’re already great at handling end-to-end.” He stressed the importance of addressing compliance concerns and customer contact litigation. More importantly, he underscored that the company’s big picture, longer term vision is to integrate all of these fragmented processes into an easy, streamlined workflow.
Right now, Rulebase is concentrated on powering enterprise banks, neobanks and card issuers around traditionally on Africa, Europe and the USA. Its utility is all to improve the quality control/quality assurance process, and help place the company to be more widely deployed in the future. The startup is already getting traction, scoring big name clients. It’s rolled out its services for Rho, a U.S. business banking platform, and a large Fortune 50 financial institution.
Williams painted an optimistic picture of how startups, like Rulebase, could use AI to do transformative things. “We’re in a moment where small teams can deliver more value, more quickly than ever before,” he remarked. He went on to say that restricting capabilities to specific verticals would be a disservice to future growth.
AI innovation is quickly reshaping nearly every industry. Rulebase is certainly finding its space in the very competitive fintech startup space. The company’s long-term mission is to automate as much of the back-office work as possible. It holds the potential to change the way financial institutions do business.
It seems like a no-brainer with AI that you have to chase the potential of something huge, Williams concluded. So anything short of the most ambitious version of your idea probably won’t be enough. This point of view exemplifies the founders’ ambition to maximize Rulebase’s impact, scaling it across the vast financial services sector.
