The Y Combinator-backed startup has introduced four AI tools to automate financial tasks, monitor risks, and help African businesses manage their operations more efficiently.
Nigerian fintech startup Bujeti has launched Brain, an artificial intelligence platform designed to automate routine financial tasks and reduce the administrative burden on business finance teams.
The platform became publicly available on September 30, 2026, following a private beta that began two weeks earlier. It features four AI assistants, which the company calls teammates, to handle invoice processing, debt collection, financial risk monitoring, and employee enquiries.
The launch expands Bujeti’s financial management services as businesses increasingly explore AI-powered tools to improve efficiency and reduce manual work.
Four AI Assistants Handle Routine Financial Tasks
Brain’s four assistants are designed to manage specific responsibilities within a business’s finance operations.
Fetch searches emails, storage platforms, and accounting applications for invoices, receipts, and bank statements. It extracts relevant information and refers uncertain results to a human for review.
Chaser follows up on unpaid invoices through email, SMS and WhatsApp. It can also negotiate payment plans when customers can't pay their outstanding balances in full.
Watchdog monitors transactions, vendors, and contracts daily, identifies potential risks, and alerts businesses to upcoming contract renewals.
Concierge answers employees’ finance-related questions using their organisation’s internal financial policies.
Fetch and Chaser entered private beta on September 16, while Watchdog and Concierge were initially available to enterprise customers. All four assistants subsequently became accessible to every business using Bujeti.
The company expects the tools to help finance teams spend less time on repetitive administrative work and more time on financial planning and decision-making.
Bujeti Highlights Integration and Security Controls
According to co-founder Cossi Achille Arouko, Brain’s key advantage is its integration with Bujeti’s existing financial infrastructure.
“Most AI finance tools sit beside the ledger and have to be fed data,” Arouko said, explaining that the company had spent three years building its financial ledger.
As a result, Brain can access information on accounts, budgets, vendors, contracts and transactions already recorded within the platform.
The company has also introduced safeguards to limit the risks associated with AI-driven financial operations.
None of the assistants has standing authority to move money. Actions with low-confidence results are referred to human reviewers, while activities are logged and each assistant can be controlled separately.
Arouko also said customer data would not be used to train external AI models.
These measures are intended to maintain human oversight and protect business information as companies introduce AI into sensitive financial processes.
Startup Plans Broader Debt Collection and AI Integration
Bujeti is developing additional capabilities for Brain, including expanding Chaser into full debt and loan collection.
The startup said early internal tests showed that the tool recovered 3.2 times more on its most difficult accounts than a manual team. The company has not presented this result as an independently verified industry-wide performance measure.
Bujeti is also building its Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector, which is intended to let AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude access business financial data and perform authorised actions.
The planned integration could enable businesses to interact with their financial information through external AI assistants while retaining controls over data access and permitted activities.
From Paystack Experience to African Financial Technology
Bujeti was founded by Arouko and Samy Chiba. Arouko, an engineer from Cotonou who trained in France, previously worked as a technical lead at Nigerian payments company Paystack.
During his time there, he encountered an American expense management platform that provided corporate cards with real-time spending limits and linked expenditure to budgets.
Seeing an opportunity to introduce similar capabilities to African businesses, he left Paystack and partnered with Chiba, formerly of aerospace company Arianespace, to establish Bujeti.
The startup now offers corporate cards, automated vendor payments with multi-level approvals, budgeting, invoicing, business accounts, tax management, payroll and a mobile application.
According to the company, more than 2,000 finance professionals in Nigeria and Kenya use its platform.
Bujeti participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch and later raised US$2.5 million in seed funding.
Bujeti Sets Ambitious Growth Target
The company aims to become one of Africa’s three leading financial management platforms within five years.
Arouko said its broader ambition was to give businesses access to sophisticated financial management capabilities, even when they could not afford to employ a chief financial officer.
Brain’s long-term success will depend on its reliability, security and ability to deliver measurable improvements in financial operations. However, its launch signals Bujeti’s ambition to combine financial infrastructure with AI automation to serve businesses across African markets.
Source: Disrupt Africa