Nigerian developer-tooling startup Frain Technologies, has raised US$473,000 in pre-seed funding to expand its existing product and develop new ones.
Rally Cap Ventures led the pre-seed funding round, which also includes Musha Ventures, Future Africa, Eric Idiah, Tomiwa Lasebikan, Prosper Otemuyiwa, Odunayo Eweniyi, Timi Ajiboye, Opeyemi Awoyemi, and numerous other angel investors. Frain Technologies will use the funds to bring Convoy to maturity both locally and globally, as well as develop additional 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.
Subomi Oluwalana, co-founder and CEO of Frain, quit his position as a backend developer at Nigerian fintech Tangerine Life in February 2021 to build APIs for fintech. For several months, the team tried to offer APIs to businesses with co-founder and COO Emmanuel Aina, but with little success.
While tweaking their solution to make it more economically feasible, the team discovered that webhooks were a common issue among startups looking to establish APIs. Webhooks are simply the glue that holds APIs together. They are a crucial infrastructure component for most API firms (like Stripe, Twillo, or Paystack).
Essentially, a failed webhooks event has a direct impact on customers, hence Frain created Convoy, a cloud-native webhook service that allows developers to transmit webhook events to their users in minutes. Engineers had to create and maintain this infrastructure component in-house prior to the creation of Convoy when developing APIs. The service has been well accepted since its inception, with a number of companies, including Buycoins, Termii, GetWallets, and Dojah, adopting it in production.
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.
