Frain Technologies, a Nigerian developer-tooling startup focused on establishing webhooks infrastructure, just raised $473k in a pre-seed investment.

Musha Ventures, Future Africa, Eric Idiahi, Aidi Ventures, Tomiwa Lasebikan, Prosper Otemuyiwa, Odunayo Eweniyi, Timi Ajiboye, Opeyemi Awoyemi, and numerous other angel investors participated in the pre-seed round, which was led by Rally Cap Ventures. Frain Technologies will use the funds to bring its flagship product, Convoy, to market maturity both locally and globally.

“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,” the CEO of Frain, Subomi said. 

With the funding, Frain will continue to invest in Convoy’s development and create more developer tools.

Why The Investors Invested

“Rally Cap Ventures invests 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,” Hayden Simmons, Founder of Rally Cap Ventures noted in a statement.

A Look At What The Startup Does

SubomiOluwalana and Emmanuel Aina created Frain Technologies, a developer tooling firm based in Nigeria, in 2021. By building tools for the product delivery value chain, the startup is revolutionizing the way goods are developed. Convoy, the company’s flagship product, is an open-source webhooks service that allows developers to send webhook events to users. Frain has assisted major organizations such as Buycoins, Termii, GetWallets, and Dojah in focusing less on infrastructure and more on establishing their API since its launch early last year.

Read also The Five Tech Trends That Will Dominate Business in 2022

Subomi Oluwalana, co-founder and CEO of Frain, founded the company after quitting his job as a backend engineer at Tangerine Life, one of Nigeria’s leading financial firms, to focus on building 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 refining their solution to make it more economically feasible, the team discovered that webhooks were a common issue among startups looking to establish APIs.

Convoy, a cloud-native webhook solution that allows developers to push webhook events to their consumers in minutes, was born out of this insight. Webhooks are an important part of the infrastructure for most API companies, such as Stripe, Twillo, and Paystack.

Webhooks have become a vital component of modern APIs for non-technical users. APIs are theoretically held together by this glue. In essence, a failed webhooks event has a direct impact on the client.

A failed Paystack event indicates that a consumer will not receive value for their Domino’s purchase while receiving a debit alert. It means that if a Piggyvest customer receives a debit alert, they will not be able to see their top-up.

Read also Africa’s Transporters Adopt Cellulant’s Technology in Bid to Digitize the Sector

Convoy has been well received by the local community since its inception, with a number of businesses using it in production. Buycoins, Termii, GetWallets, Dojah, and a few others are among the most notable.

Frain pre-seed Frain pre-seed

Hong Kong-based Investor Leads $2.7m pre-Series B Round In Egyptian Ecommerce Startup ExpandCart 

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer