Frain, a Nigerian startup, helps developers ship APIs quicker Nigerian startup Frain is building an open-source webhooks service — Convoy — that enables developers and companies to build and release APIs more quickly and securely.

In the past, developers had to construct and maintain these infrastructures themselves and incur engineering costs upfront. Frain’s solution, ConvoyIt allows companies to ship APIs more quickly and requires less infrastructure. FrainIt all began in February 2021 when Subomi Oluwalana (co-founder, CEO) quit his job as a backend development engineer at Nigerian fintech Tangerine Life and started to develop APIs for fintech. The team attempted to sell APIs for startups for many months with Emmanuel Aina as co-founder and COO. However, it was unsuccessful. The team began to tweak their solution to make it more profitable. However, they realized that webhooks were an issue faced by many startups who want to create APIs. Webhooks, which are an essential component of API businesses like Stripe, Twillo, and Paystack, are basically the glue that makes APIs function. “Essentially, a failed webhooks event has a direct customer impact. A failed event from Paystack means a customer won’t receive value for their purchase on Domino’s while the customer has received a debit alert,” Aina said. This realization pushed the pair to create Convoy — a cloud-native webhook service that allows developers to push webhook events to their users in a matter of minutes. The adoption was rapid. “The reception for Convoy has been massive. It is currently being used in Termii and BuyCoins as well as Dojah and Getwallets. The developer community has also commented that it is indeed an essential tool,” said Aina. Frain is a January specialty A pre-seed round of funding totaling US$473,000 was raisedLed by Rally Cap VenturesIncludes a copy of the following: Musha Ventures, Future Africa, Eric Idiah, Tomiwa Lasebikan, Prosper Otemuyiwa, Odunayo Eweniyi, Timi Ajiboye, Opeyemi AwoyemiYou can also contact several angels. “We are currently operating in the African market with a particular focus on Nigeria. We are open to developers from all over the world. This funding will enable us to invest in our community locally and globally as well as build more products,” said Aina. Frain makes money with its Cloud Platform for companies who are not able to maintain Convoy infrastructure themselves. “With this, they can offload all their webhooks infrastructure burden on us to provide reliability and security out-of-the-box,” said Aina. “For the most part, most companies have an implementation of webhooks in-house. Many wonder why Convoy was chosen over the current webhook implementations. But we’re confident we’ve built a product that is 10 times better than most in-house implementations and we’re still in the very early stages of fulfilling our mission. We think with time, the difference will be clear and more people will be willing to switch their current implementations as our current customers did.”