Y Combinator-Alm Regulatory letter Betting that the next wave of automation in financial services will not be about attractive AI interfaces, but about unrelated back-office functions such as compliance.
Startup was established in 2024 Gidon abos And Chidi WilliamsTwo Nigerian engineers found in London collected a $ 2.1 million pre-seed round under the leadership of Bowery Capital, with only Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transport platform VC and several angels.
Financial services firm spend huge amounts of effort on support tickets, resolve disputes, ensure quality assurance and regulatory compliance. The software of the rules, which he calls an agent co-worker, replaces the manual grunt work in these tasks. Its AI agent can evaluate customer interactions, flag regulatory risks, and trigger correct follow-ups in devices such as Zendesk, Jira, and Slack, which demands financial firms without losing the human-in-loop overs.
CTO Williams said, “Our ‘colleague’ equipment integrates on 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.” Currently, the year -old startup is already posted in customers such as the US Business Banking Platform RHO and an anonymous Fortune 50 financial institution.
Rulebase was not the first swing of founders. Ebose, a former product lead in Microsoft, and a former back-end engineer in Goldman Sachs, Williams, made several products simultaneously, such as AI customer response tools like finally settling on the rules. The idea came after seeing how disabled back-office operations in small and large financial institutions, especially when it came in the regulatory workflows.
The startup currently focuses on the workflows triggered by customer service interaction, with its first veg around quality assurance. QA analysts in traditional financial institutions usually reviewed 3% to 5% support interactions to ensure that the representative follows the compliance protocol.
Founders say that the rulbase now evaluates 100% of such conversations, cuts up to 70% of the cost. For example, in the case of RHO, Rulebase has helped in an increase of up to 30%.
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“We automate the workflows that begins with a customer conversation, the areas that we are already great in handling the end-to-end,” CEO Abos said in an interview with Techchchan. “While most of them are associated with QA, compliance, and controversies with customer calls and messages, our goal for a long time is to take these fragmented stages and tabs into a coordinated workflow and take several manual back-office functions as possible.”
The new funding will help double it on engineering and eventually AI will add new features to the AI colleague such as fraud investigation, audit preparation and regulatory reporting.
The rule focuses on financial services for now as automation demands accuracy. “You need to understand the rules of MasterCard, CFPB deadline. The depth of domain knowledge is our gap,” said Ibos.
The company is targeting trade banks, neobanks and card issuers in Africa, Europe and America, but the roadmap may eventually include adjacent verticals such as insurance, where similar workflows exist.
Founders say that the revenue has been increasing rapidly since the decline of Y Combinator joining 2024 batch, with the growth of month-by-month, the founders say. The business model of the rules is use-based, reviewing per interaction or charging to automate workflow.
To visit the YC Building AI Tool as one of the few African founders, the advice of Abos and Williams is trying to accept the founders in global accelerator, it is that it is to think globally from the day itself.
Williams commented, “We are in a moment where small teams can distribute more than ever, so can limit themselves to ‘X’ or a narrow vertical feels like a missed opportunity,” Williams commented. “With AI, it seems clear that you have to go after some large scale. Nothing less than the most ambitious version of your idea,” said Williams who built a buzz before the rules, which was an initial open source speech-sequent tool with more than 300,000 downloads and more than 12,000 GITHUB stars.
