Nigerian developer-tooling startup Frain technologies just completed a $473k pre-seed round. The startup dedicated to building webhooks infrastructure announced the successful seed round led by Rally Cap Ventures and drew participation from Future Africa, Musha Ventures, Aidi Ventures, and angel investors such as Eric Idiahi, Tomiwa Lasebikan, Prosper Otemuyiwa, Timi Ajiboye, Opeyemi Awoyemi, Odunayo Eweniyi. The funds will go towards the continued development of Convoy and more developer tools.
Founder and CEO Subomi Oluwalana started the company in 2017 when he quit his job as a backend developer for leading Nigeria fintech startup Tangerine Life to focus on building fintech APIs. This was alongside Emmanuel Aina the co-founder/COO. The team worked to sell APIs for startups for many months without success. While tweaking their solution the team realized webhooks was a major problem faced by startups working towards building APIs.
This resulted in the creation of Convoy. Webhooks are a core infrastructure component for API-driven businesses such as Twillo, Stripe, and Paystack. For non-technicals, Webhooks is a critical component of modern APIs, the glue that makes APIs work. The use of Convoy means developers do not have to build and maintain their infrastructure in-house but rather can this open-source product to fast track their building process.
Since its launch, Convoy has received a great reception from the local community as pertains to a number of companies. Most notable are Buycoins, GetWallets, Termii, Dojah, and several others. In the press release, Emmanuel Aina, the co-founder/COO at Convoy described how this product can be used by any developer building a product that requires webhooks.