Bujeti, a Y Combinator-backed Nigerian fintech, is turning its financial management platform into an artificial intelligence (AI) workforce that can process documents, chase unpaid invoices, monitor transactions, and answer employees’ finance questions.
Its Real-time Agent Intelligence Network (BRAIN) uses four AI agents, which Bujeti calls Teammates, to automate routine finance tasks using the accounts, budgets, vendors, contracts and transactions already on its platform. The company said Teammates will become publicly available on September 30.
The launch comes as African businesses move beyond experimenting with AI to embedding it in daily operations. A May 2026 PwC study found that 82% of organisations in Africa were running AI pilots, Africa were running AI pilots, but few had scaled AI across their businesses. African organisations were also investing an average of 2% of revenue in AI.
“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,” said Cossi Achille Arouko, co-founder of Bujeti. ”BRAIN does not sit beside the ledger and ask to be fed. It reads the books we spent three years making legible.”
Arouko and Samy Chiba founded Bujeti in 2022 as a remittance product. Arouko said the company pivoted in 2023 after hearing from founders who struggled to control how their teams spent company money. It started with corporate cards, then expanded into spending approvals, budgets, vendor payments, business accounts, invoicing, tax, and payroll.
The company was part of YC’s Winter 2023 batch and raised $2 million from YC, Entrée Capital, Voltron Capital, Kima Ventures, and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi. Bujeti currently considers Nigeria and Kenya as its two fully operational markets, and says more than 1,000 teams now use the platform.
How BRAIN works
BRAIN sits atop the system Bujeti has spent the past three years building: the AI agents can work with the accounts, budgets, vendors, contracts, and transactions already incorporated in Bujeti. An invoice captured by one AI agent can become information another agent uses to monitor a transaction.
BRAIN is made up of four AI Teammates, each responsible for a different part of the finance function, according to Bujeti. The first AI teammate is Fetch, which handles documents by connecting to a company’s storage and accounting applications to find invoices and receipts and extract relevant information. It also assigns a confidence score to what it has extracted and sends the task to a human for intervention if the system is not sufficiently confident, Bujeti explained.
Chaser, the second teammate, handles accounts receivable and can follow up with customers about unpaid invoices through email, SMS, and WhatsApp. If a customer cannot pay the full amount, Chaser can negotiate a payment plan or partial settlement and report the case for human intervention if there is a dispute, Bujeti added.
The third, Watchdog, focuses on financial controls. It scans vendor activity and contracts and raises alerts based on their severity. The final teammate is Concierge, an internal finance knowledge assistant. Employees can ask it questions about the company’s financial policies.
“What makes them a team, and not four tools, is that they work on one ledger, the one already inside Bujeti. What Fetch captures, Watchdog can flag. What Chaser collects, your books already know,” Arouko said. “They handle the routine so your people handle the judgment, and you stay in control.”
Bujeti said BRAIN does not rely on a single AI model; rather, it uses an orchestration layer that can route different tasks to different models. Bujeti noted that any irreversible task, such as moving money, cannot be completed by an AI agent on its own. Instead, the agent creates a proposal that a named person must approve.
“We are responsible for the system doing what we say it does: the gate holding, the threshold behaving as configured, the audit trail being complete enough that you can reconstruct exactly why something happened and who committed it,” Arouko said. “If any of those fail, that is ours, and it is the thing we should be judged on. The decision itself belongs to the person who committed it, exactly as it did before we existed.”
Bujeti is joining a growing group of African technology companies using AI to automate parts of business operations rather than simply adding AI features to existing products. In June, Paystack launched Index, an experimental product that lets Nigerian consumers complete transactions with supported merchants through AI agents. In July, SeamlessHR, the Nigerian human resources software company, rebranded as Seamless Technologies and expanded its product portfolio to include AI.
Instead of using AI as a new interface for payments or as an additional product layer, BRAIN is designed to act inside the financial workflows businesses already run on Bujeti. The company said it is also building a system for businesses to access that financial intelligence outside its platform through a connection.
Its forthcoming Bujeti MCP will allow AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude to connect to a company’s Bujeti account, subject to the user’s existing permissions, to query marketing spend, overdue invoices, outstanding customer debt or cash balances.
Bujeti competes with other local players such as Flex, Duplo and Karty, as well as global competitors including Ramp, Brex and Bill. The company believes its advantage is the financial infrastructure underneath the AI models it is releasing. It said the advantage will depend on how quickly it can continue expanding what its ledger can see and what BRAIN can do.
Bujeti said it is targeting the mid-market and enterprise segment, particularly businesses with more than 20 employees and complex financial operations. As at 2021, Kenya had over 138,000 formal establishments, while Nigeria had over 39 million micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) as of 2020.
“The opportunity isn’t just about the number of businesses,” Arouko said. “As more African businesses formalise, grow their teams and manage increasingly complex spend, we believe this transition will create a large and expanding market for Bujeti.”
Bujeti said it plans to expand into Francophone Africa, where it sees an opportunity to serve businesses across several connected financial markets. However, it did not disclose the specific countries or launch timeline. Across the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) region, mobile money accounts reached 248 million in 2024, up nearly 19% year on year.
However, the company said it will judge its expansion by whether businesses in each new market can run their finances end-to-end on Bujeti. The expansion will require Bujeti to support local accounts, payments, payroll, tax rules and other financial workflows that businesses need to operate.
“Our opportunity isn’t limited to one country’s banking infrastructure,” Arouko said. “The increasingly connected financial ecosystem across UEMOA gives Bujeti a foundation to build for businesses across multiple markets, extending the same mid-market and enterprise strategy we are pursuing in Nigeria and Kenya.”
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