Rulebase Raises $2.1M to Automate Fintech Back-Office Workflows
Back-office operations in financial services are tedious, costly, and often prone to regulatory risk. Rulebase, a young startup backed by Y Combinator, wants to fix that. The company has secured $2.1 million in pre-seed funding to expand its “AI co-worker” software that helps fintechs automate compliance-heavy workflows.
The round was led by Bowery Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform VC, and several angel investors.
Founded in 2024 by Gideon Ebose and Chidi Williams, Rulebase positions itself as an automation layer for fintech back offices. Its platform integrates with tools like Slack, Zendesk, and Jira, reviewing customer interactions, flagging regulatory risks, and handling dispute resolutions. The startup describes it as an “AI coworker” that can cut down manual reviews and reduce escalations, while still leaving humans in control.
Some traction is already visible. Rulebase counts U.S. business banking platform Rho among its clients, alongside an unnamed Fortune 50 financial institution. Early results suggest the system can lower QA costs by as much as 70 percent and reduce case escalations by 30 percent.
The company plans to use the fresh capital to grow its engineering team and expand into more complex functions such as fraud investigations, audit preparation, and regulatory reporting. Its customer focus for now is fintechs, neobanks, and card issuers, but Rulebase also has its eye on insurance and other regulated sectors.
For investors, the appeal is clear. Financial institutions spend billions every year managing compliance and customer disputes manually. Rulebase is betting that automation, framed as an AI co-worker rather than a replacement, will ease adoption in a sector known for caution and regulatory scrutiny.
Whether the startup can scale its promise across the messy realities of global financial workflows remains to be seen. But with $2.1 million in backing and early signs of product-market fit, Rulebase has placed itself in the growing wave of AI-first back-office automation tools trying to reshape how fintechs operate behind the scenes.
