$473k pre-seed funding raised by Nigerian developer-tooling startup Frain Technologies
Frain Technologies, a Nigerian developer-tooling business, has secured US $473,000 in pre-seed capital to expand its present product and develop new ones.
Subomi Oluwalana, co-founder and CEO of Frain, abandoned his position as a backend engineer at Nigerian fintech Tangerine Life in February 2021 to design APIs for fintech. For several months, the team sought to offer APIs to businesses alongside co-founder and COO Emmanuel Aina, but with little success.
While refining 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).
In essence, 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 development of Convoy when developing APIs. The service has been well accepted since its inception, with a number of firms, including Buycoins, Termii, GetWallets, and Dojah, adopting it in production.
Rally Cap Ventures led the US $473,000 pre-seed fundraising round, which also included Musha Ventures, Future Africa, Eric Idiah, Tomiwa Lasebikan, Prosper Otemuyiwa, Odunayo Eweniyi, Timi Ajiboye, Opeyemi Awoyemi, and numerous other angel investors. Frain Technologies will be able to take advantage of the funding round.
“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.
Rally Cap Ventures CEO Hayden Simmons said his business invests in key infrastructure API firms that help financial solutions grow across emerging economies.
“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.
