Nigerian fintech startup Bujeti has made Brain, an agentic AI platform for finance teams, publicly available following a two-week private beta.
Founded by Cossi Achille Arouko and Samy Chiba, Bujeti offers corporate cards with real-time controls, vendor payment automation with multi-level approvals, budgeting, invoicing, business accounts, a tax module, payroll and a mobile app. More than 2,000 finance professionals in Nigeria and Kenya use the platform.
A participant in Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch, Bujeti went on to raise US$2.5 million in seed funding, and has now launched Brain. The platform provides four AI “teammates” that handle routine finance work.
Fetch finds invoices, receipts and statements across email, storage and accounting apps, extracts the data, and routes low-confidence results to a human. Chaser runs invoice collections over email, SMS and WhatsApp, and can negotiate payment plans when customers cannot pay in full. Watchdog scans transactions, vendors and contracts daily, flagging risks and upcoming renewals. Concierge answers staff finance questions using the company’s own policies.
“Most AI finance tools sit beside the ledger and have to be fed data,” Arouko said. “Bujeti spent three years building the ledger first, so Brain reads across every account, budget, vendor, contract and transaction already inside it.”
No “teammate” has standing authority to move money.
“Low-confidence actions go to a person, every action is logged, each teammate is controlled separately, and customer data is not used to train outside models,” said Arouko.
Fetch and Chaser opened in private beta on September 16, with Watchdog and Concierge available to enterprise customers. All four became available to every Bujeti business on September 30.
Next, the startup is extending Chaser to full debt and loan collection. Early internal tests show it recovering 3.2 times more on the hardest accounts than a manual team. It is also building the Bujeti MCP, a connector that will let AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT query a business’s finance data and act on it, with permissions.
Arouko, an engineer from Cotonou who trained in France, was previously a technical lead at Paystack. There, he was struck by the American expense platform the company used internally, which issued cards with live limits and tied spending to budgets.
“Nothing like it existed for African businesses,” Arouko told Disrupt Africa. He left Paystack, partnered with Chiba, formerly of Arianespace, and started building.
Bujeti aims to be one of Africa’s top three financial management platforms within five years.
“Every ambitious African business should be able to run its finances with a CFO in the room, whether or not it can afford to hire one,” Arouko said.
