Nigerian developer-tooling startup Frain Technologies has raised a US$473,000 pre-seed funding round to further invest in its existing product and build new ones.
Frain started in February 2021, when co-founder and CEO Subomi Oluwalana quit his job as a backend developer at Nigerian fintech Tangerine Life to build APIs for fintech. Alongside co-founder and COO Emmanuel Aina, the team tried to sell APIs to startups for several months, without much success.
While tweaking their solution to be more commercially viable, the team realised that webhooks were a ubiquitous problem faced by most startups looking to build APIs. Webhooks, a core infrastructure component for most API businesses (like Stripe, Twillo or Paystack), are essentially the glue that makes APIs work.
Essentially, a failed webhooks event has a direct customer impact, and to avoid such events, Frain has built Convoy, a cloud-native webhook service that allows developers to push webhook events to their users in a matter of minutes. Prior to the creation of Convoy, engineers needed to build and maintain this infrastructure component in-house when building their APIs. Since its launch, the service has received a great reception, with a number of companies using it in production, notably Buycoins, Termii, GetWallets and Dojah.
The US$473,000 pre-seed funding round is led by Rally Cap Ventures, and also includes Musha Ventures, Future Africa, Eric Idiah, Tomiwa Lasebikan, Prosper Otemuyiwa, Odunayo Eweniyi, Timi Ajiboye, Opeyemi Awoyemi, and several other angels. The round will enable Frain Technologies to take Convoy to maturity both locally and globally, as well as build new products.
“We are excited to have received the support and endorsement of these investors and we look to grow and expand our product offerings in the coming months, while also increasing the number of clients that we cater to. We believe these are interesting times for Frain Technologies. We are super passionate about open-source and developer tools and championing a new crop of startups building global dev tools. We are building the next HashiCorp, GitLab, GitHub out of Lagos, Nigeria,” said Oluwalana.
Hayden Simmons, founder of Rally Cap Ventures, said his firm invested in core infrastructural API companies that enable fintech solutions to scale across emerging markets.
“Immediately upon meeting Subomi and Emmanuel, it was clear that they’re deeply passionate experts, building in a critical space. After sharing with our portfolio companies, it was also clear their product is in high demand not just across Africa, but globally as well,” he said.
