Bujeti has launched BRAIN, its new artificial intelligence layer designed to help African businesses reduce repetitive finance work and make faster decisions using real-time financial information.
The platform, which stands for Bujeti’s Real-time Artificial Intelligence Network, introduces four specialised AI Teammates: Fetch, Chaser, Watchdog and Concierge. Each is built to manage a different part of finance operations, from finding financial documents and following up on unpaid invoices to monitoring financial controls and answering employees’ finance-related questions.
The initiative is aimed at helping finance teams spend less time on routine administrative work and more time understanding what their financial information means and acting on it.
“AI is not here to replace people. It is here to eliminate busy work and empower finance teams to do more,” said Cossi Achille Arouko, co-founder and CEO of Bujeti.
He said the platform gives finance teams in Africa the ability to move beyond simply tracking past transactions and towards understanding financial information and taking action in real time.
BRAIN is the latest stage in Bujeti’s development as a financial platform for African businesses. Arouko and Samy Chiba founded the company in 2022, initially as a remittance product. The company changed direction in 2023 after hearing from founders who were struggling to control how their teams spent company money.
That shift led Bujeti to focus on business finance management. It began with corporate cards and later expanded into spending approvals, budgets, vendor payments, business accounts, invoicing, tax management and payroll.
The expansion allowed Bujeti to build a broader financial infrastructure around how businesses manage and control money. BRAIN now adds an intelligence layer to that infrastructure.
Four AI Teammates built around finance operations
The four AI Teammates operate using the financial information, workflows and controls already available in a company’s Bujeti account. This means finance teams do not have to repeatedly provide background information for the AI to understand the business.
Fetch, the Head of Document Intelligence, connects to email, storage and accounting applications to locate invoices, receipts and statements. It extracts important information from those documents and assigns a confidence score. When the system is uncertain, the item is sent to a human for review.
Chaser, the Head of Accounts Receivable, focuses on invoice collections. It can follow up with customers through email, SMS and WhatsApp and manage different stages of the collection process. Where a customer cannot settle an invoice in full, Chaser can help negotiate a payment plan. Questions and disputes are escalated to a human.
Watchdog serves as the Head of Financial Controls. It monitors transactions, vendors and contracts and raises alerts based on the level of severity. It can also flag contracts that are approaching expiry or automatic renewal, giving businesses an opportunity to act before an issue becomes a larger financial problem.
Concierge, the Head of Finance Knowledge, answers employees’ finance-related questions using the company’s own policies and provides sources for its answers. It is also designed to acknowledge when it does not have enough information instead of guessing.
The four Teammates operate from the same financial ledger within Bujeti. This allows information handled by one Teammate to support the work of another. For example, documents captured by Fetch can be monitored by Watchdog, while transactions linked to collections managed by Chaser are already reflected in the company’s financial records.
This shared system is intended to make finance operations more connected rather than treating each task as a separate process.
Building on Bujeti’s financial infrastructure
Bujeti’s development since its 2023 pivot has included significant investment in its financial infrastructure. The company was one of three African startups selected for Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch and has raised $2 million from investors including Y Combinator, Entrée Capital, Voltron Capital, Kima Ventures and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi.
More than 1,000 finance professionals across Nigeria and Kenya currently use Bujeti to run their financial operations.
BRAIN builds on this existing customer base and the financial information already within the platform. Unlike generic AI assistants that operate separately from a company’s financial systems, Bujeti’s Teammates can work with accounts, budgets, vendors, contracts and transactions already stored within the platform.
That approach is intended to reduce the need for finance teams to move information between different systems while giving AI more context about how their businesses operate.
Bujeti has also built human oversight into BRAIN, particularly where sensitive financial actions are involved. The AI Teammates cannot independently move funds, while sensitive actions require human approval. Low-confidence items are also referred to people for review.
Every Teammate action is recorded in an audit trail, and businesses can enable or disable individual Teammates based on their needs.
Bujeti says customer data remains owned by customers and is not used to train AI models. The company also says the data is protected through encryption and organisational isolation.
The launch is part of a wider AI strategy. Bujeti is developing the Bujeti MCP, a secure connector intended to allow AI assistants and coding agents such as Claude, ChatGPT, Manus and DeepSeek to connect to a company’s Bujeti financial intelligence, subject to permissions and controls.
The company is also working to expand Chaser into debt and loan collection. Early internal tests have shown higher recovery rates on difficult accounts, although Bujeti describes these capabilities as part of its roadmap and not as a current performance guarantee.
“What you see today is the foundation, and it will keep improving,” said Edidiong Ekong, Head of Growth and Intelligence at Bujeti.
According to Ekong, the Teammates are designed to become more effective as they work with a business and understand its policies and daily processes. The broader goal is to reduce the amount of manual work handled by finance teams and give them more time to focus on business decisions.
BRAIN is rolling out in stages. Fetch and Chaser are available to Bujeti customers from 16 September 2026. Watchdog and Concierge are available to Enterprise customers from the same date and will become available to all customers on 30 September 2026.
For Bujeti, the long-term aim is to give African businesses access to financial intelligence that can help them identify problems earlier, answer questions faster and manage routine finance work with less manual effort.
Source: TechPoint
