Nigerian developer-tooling startup Frain Technologies secures $473k pre-seed funding

Frain Technologies, a Nigerian developer-tooling business, has raised US$473,000 in pre-seed capital to further invest in its existing products and develop new ones.

Frain began in February 2021, when co-founder and CEO Subomi Oluwalana left his job as a backend developer at Nigerian fintech Tangerine Life to establish APIs for the fintech industry. For several months, the team, led by co-founder and COO Emmanuel Aina, attempted to offer APIs to businesses without much success.

While refining their solution to make it more economically feasible, the team realized that webhooks were a common issue for most firms looking to establish APIs. Webhooks, a critical infrastructure component for the majority of API firms (such as Stripe, Twillo, or Paystack), are simply the glue that holds APIs together.

A failed webhooks event has a direct consumer impact, therefore Frain has launched Convoy, a cloud-native webhook service that allows developers to transmit webhook events to their users in a matter of minutes, to avoid such incidents. Prior to Convoy, engineers had to construct and manage this infrastructure component in-house when developing APIs. Since its inception, the service has been well accepted, with a number of companies, including Buycoins, Termii, GetWallets, and Dojah, using it in production.

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.

Rally Cap Ventures founder Hayden Simmons stated that his business invests in key infrastructural API firms that enable fintech solutions to spread across emerging countries.

“From the moment I met Subomi and Emmanuel, it was evident that they are highly dedicated experts working in an important field.” “After sharing with our portfolio companies, it became evident that their product is in high demand not just in Africa, but also globally,” he said.