We are excited to announce our investment in Rulebase, an AI coworker platform for financial services back-office operations. We recently led a $2.1MM pre-seed round into the business alongside Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform VC, and several strategic angels. This investment was informed by the opportunity we see in the emerging wave of "back office" AI companies, particularly those addressing the complex operational and compliance challenges that financial institutions face daily.
Rulebase was founded by Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams to deploy AI agents that handle the unglamorous but critical back-office tasks that keep financial services running smoothly. Gideon brings deep product expertise from his time as a product lead at Microsoft, while Chidi is an exceptional engineer with experience building scalable systems at Goldman Sachs, as well as creating the popular open-source speech-to-text tool Buzz, which has garnered over 300,000 downloads and 12,000 GitHub stars. The two Nigerian engineers met in London and share a passion for solving complex operational challenges through thoughtful AI implementation. From our first meeting, we were impressed by their technical depth and their clear vision for transforming financial operations.
Financial services firms spend enormous resources on support ticket resolution, dispute management, quality assurance, and regulatory compliance - all critical functions that have traditionally relied on manual processes prone to errors and inefficiencies. Rulebase's AI coworker integrates seamlessly across existing platforms like Zendesk, Jira, and Slack, automating workflows while maintaining the human-in-the-loop oversight that financial institutions require. What sets Rulebase apart is their focus on workflows triggered by customer service interactions, starting with quality assurance. While traditional QA teams manually review only 3-5% of support interactions for compliance, Rulebase evaluates 100% of interactions automatically, cutting costs by up to 70% and dramatically improving compliance coverage.
The need for this solution is clear; financial institutions of all sizes struggle with the same operational bottlenecks. Rulebase is already deployed at customers including Rho, a leading U.S. business banking platform where they've reduced escalations by 30%, and a Fortune 50 financial institution. The company has seen remarkable traction since our investment, with double-digit month-over-month revenue growth.
Financial services automation demands a level of precision and domain expertise that creates a significant moat. As CEO Gideon Ebose noted, understanding the intricacies of MasterCard's rules, CFPB timelines, and other regulatory requirements is essential to building a trusted solution. This depth of knowledge, combined with their usage-based pricing model that aligns incentives between Rulebase and their customers, positions the company to become the standard for back-office automation in financial services.
While Rulebase is initially focused on business banks, neobanks, and card issuers across Africa, Europe, and the U.S., the roadmap extends far beyond. The same operational challenges exist in adjacent verticals like insurance, and the platform's architecture enables expansion into fraud investigation, audit preparation, and regulatory reporting. With financial services representing one of the largest and most critical sectors of the global economy, the opportunity for intelligent automation is massive.
We are grateful to partner with Gideon and Chidi as they build the AI infrastructure that will power the next generation of financial services operations. Their combination of technical excellence, domain expertise, and ambitious vision makes them exactly the kind of founders we seek to support. We look forward to the journey ahead as Rulebase transforms how financial institutions handle their most critical operational tasks.
Rulebase is based in London and San Francisco.
