Building Y-Queue took Emmanuel Obiechina and his co-founders simply three weeks. Convincing individuals to make use of it proved to be a wholly completely different training.
Long earlier than he conceived Kira AI—his WhatsApp-based banking and funds platform—Obiechina noticed a clear engineering answer to a persistent campus headache. At the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), college students routinely struggled to order meals from eating places scattered throughout the college city in Enugu State. Y-Queue was designed as his parting reward to the scholar physique: an on-demand bridge between hungry undergraduates and native kitchens, constructed with the ambition of ultimately capturing the broader meals supply market throughout Enugu metropolis.
On a display screen, the product was seamless. On the bottom, the cussed friction of bodily logistics shortly took over. Clean code might route a ticket in milliseconds, however it couldn’t drive overwhelmed kitchen workers to prep meals quicker, assure dispatch riders arrived on time, or persuade cash-conscious college students that comfort was price an additional supply price.
Obiechina had entered the enterprise with years of programming expertise and a monitor document of transport software program for worldwide engineering groups. Yet Y-Queue confronted him with a model of operational chaos that no algorithm might optimise away.
“Programming is actually the easy part,” Obiechina displays. “The difficult part of building a company is what happens after you have built it.”
That expertise modified how Obiechina considered expertise and the companies constructed round it. It additionally formed Kira, the funds startup, which grew out of an issue he encountered whereas managing transfers to Y-Queue’s eating places and dispatch riders.
But the trail that led him to construct merchandise of his personal started with a call to pursue a profession his household had not deliberate for him.
Growing up, Obiechina’s future appeared already drawn on a blueprint. His father, a pushed actual property skilled, anticipated his son to observe his path into the household commerce by finding out civil engineering. For years, Obiechina accepted the script with out query.
That modified in 2016 throughout a dialog along with his cousin, a UNN alumnus then working in banking, who launched him to the nascent promise of the software program business. Obiechina knew just about nothing about writing code, however what he heard was sufficient to dismantle his plans on the spot.
“I immediately changed my course of choice on JAMB from civil engineering to electronic engineering,” he says. “I chose electronic engineering because it was the closest to computer engineering. UNN wasn’t offering computer engineering at the time, and I didn’t want to study pure computer science.”
The sudden pivot sparked fast pressure at house. His father was livid, accusing the cousin of steering his son towards an unsure gamble. While he ultimately relented, permitting Obiechina to make his personal alternative, the concession got here with a blunt caveat: he could be strolling right into a world his father knew nothing about, fully with out household steerage.
“I told my father, ‘This is my life. This is what I want to do,’” Obiechina remembers.
In 2017, he acquired his admission letter to UNN for Electronic Engineering, stepping onto the Nsukka campus to start a five-year journey that will form his technical basis.
Learning to construct
At UNN, programming didn’t instantly change into the centre of Obiechina’s college expertise. He was elected class consultant, a job that competed with the time he wished to spend studying find out how to code. For some time, he put programming apart to give attention to his duties and grades.
His third yr introduced a change. A good friend with whom he had began studying programming earlier than college grew to become a Google Developer Expert. Observing his good friend’s progress prompted Obiechina to rethink the time he had spent away from coding.
“I really felt like I wasted a lot of time,” he says. “I felt like if I had continued, I would have gone very far in programming.”
Motivated, Obiechina resigned as class consultant and returned to coding. In a rush to catch up, he generally spent 14 to fifteen hours every day in entrance of his laptop computer.
“I wanted to be certain that by the time I was graduating, I was already a senior programmer, and that I could get a job without trying so hard,” he says.
His sense of urgency shortly pushed him past simply studying to code. In his third yr, second semester, Obiechina started creating a product impressed by an issue he had skilled firsthand: he couldn’t watch movies nonetheless displaying in cinemas whereas residing in Nsukka, which had no cinema of its personal on the time, in keeping with him.
“There was no cinema in Nsukka, so watching movies that were still showing in cinemas was almost impossible,” he says. “I started thinking about how people could watch these movies on their phones while the cinemas still made money from ticket sales.”
He discovered LD Ventures, an incubator that supplied mentorship and monetary assist, and reached out to its founder on LinkedIn. The founder took an curiosity, linked him with a community of tech expertise, and guided him by means of product growth. Together, they refined the app, met individuals within the movie business, and ultimately secured a partnership with a cinema.
But the platform struggled to realize traction. Obiechina says some cinemas considered it as a risk to their enterprise, significantly the extra income they earned from popcorn and different purchases by moviegoers.
In hindsight, he additionally wonders whether or not he didn’t make a convincing sufficient case for the thought.
“I don’t know if they did not understand the product I was building or maybe I was too young to explain it to them,” he says. “They felt like I was coming to steal their market.”
He ultimately moved on to give attention to enhancing his programming abilities. And by his remaining yr at UNN, that effort had begun to repay.
From cellular apps to electrical vehicles
Obiechina joined Dropezy, a Y Combinator-backed supply startup working in Indonesia, as a Flutter developer. The firm was constructing a platform designed to get orders to prospects inside quarter-hour. According to Obiechina, the group constructed its cellular app from scratch in underneath six weeks.
In 2022, he spent seven months at Dropezy, working alongside engineers from the United Kingdom, the United States, and different international locations. He considers this one of many durations when he realized quickest.
“I think that was actually the period where I felt I learned the fastest within the shortest period,” he says.
The expertise, in keeping with him, taught him greater than he might have realized coding alone. Though he had spent lengthy hours instructing himself programming, working alongside extra skilled engineers confirmed him how software program was in-built knowledgeable surroundings.
“I already knew programming because of the insane amount of time I spent learning every day,” he says. “But what I learned from them was more about how professional people did things.”
After Dropezy, Obiechina joined Smart-iX in September 2022, a German software program startup constructing merchandise for automotive corporations. Within three months, he says, he was promoted and given duty for his personal venture.
He later led the event of an in-car app retailer for Togg, Turkey’s electrical car (EV) maker, for its T10X electrical SUV. Built with Flutter, the open-source coding device, the software program allowed the group to carry app-based performance into the car, a unique problem from the cellular purposes he had labored on at Dropezy, a quick-commerce startup. At Smart-iX, the place he labored on the Togg venture, the group was constructing software program for vehicles, a subject with fewer established examples to attract on than standard cellular app growth.
“We were practically inventing things,” he says.
Obiechina additionally labored on SmartDwelling, an software that linked a consumer’s house and car. It might detect when somebody was leaving house and swap off the lights, or recognise once they have been approaching and allow them to flip family units on.
Within two months of becoming a member of Smart-iX, Obiechina says he rewrote SmartDwelling’s legacy codebase, serving to the corporate safe offers it had been shedding. Togg later acquired the SmartDwelling product, and Obiechina moved to the EV firm with the group.
Working at Smart-iX and Togg taught him to maneuver shortly, talk clearly, and deal with issues with urgency. These have been habits he would later attempt to instil in his personal group.
“Urgency was the key thing in both companies,” he says. “There is no problem they will give you to solve, and you will say you cannot do it. You have to learn how to move fast, communicate when things are breaking, and put urgency in whatever you are doing.”
Building for an issue near house
Even whereas engaged on software program for EVs, Obiechina confronted a extra fast downside: getting meals delivered in Nsukka.
“As a programmer, you’re indoors all day, working on your laptop, so you rely on things being delivered to you,” he says. “But in Nsukka, getting food delivered wasn’t easy. Sometimes, you’d place an order and spend so long waiting for it to arrive.”
He questioned if he might create one thing higher for his neighborhood. Alongside two pals from the college, he began Y-Queue, a meals supply startup that connects prospects with eating places and dispatch riders.
“I just felt there has to be a way for delivery to work here,” he says. “Now that I am still here, why not build something for this environment before I leave?”
By the tip of 2023, Obiechina left his job at Togg to give attention to Y-Queue, which began in Nsukka, Enugu, earlier than increasing throughout town.
Initially, Y-Queue was a standard food-delivery app. The group later reworked it right into a video-based platform the place prospects might uncover meals by means of brief clips and order straight from what they watched.
Restaurants had walk-in prospects to serve, riders wished to maximise their earnings, and prospects anticipated reasonably priced supply. For the following two years, Obiechina and his co-founders grappled with these competing calls for as they tried to make Y-Queue commercially viable.
“The thing about the delivery business is that it has a lot of moving parts,” he says. The expertise would affect what he selected to construct subsequent. “The next company I will build will have fewer moving parts.”
By August 2025, Y-Queue had been acquired in a deal involving its product and belongings, in keeping with Obiechina. The group had achieved what it got down to do: take a look at whether or not it might construct a viable enterprise in Nigeria’s tech ecosystem.
“We wanted to see if we could build something that would work in the Nigerian tech ecosystem, and we did. It worked. So, we actually sold it,” he says.
The downside that grew to become Kira
Kira grew out of an issue Obiechina encountered whereas working Y-Queue. When the corporate’s accountant grew to become unavailable, he took over funds to eating places and dispatch riders, generally making transfers to greater than 50 individuals a day.
“I instantly knew this [could not] be my life,” he mentioned. “There had to be an easier way to do these payments.”
The course of concerned switching between WhatsApp, the place recipients despatched their account particulars, and his banking app, the place he made transfers earlier than returning to WhatsApp to share receipts. Obiechina constructed a device that allow him ahead account particulars to Kira on WhatsApp and provoke funds. Other members of the finance group quickly started utilizing it, too.
After Y-Queue’s product-and-asset acquisition in August 2025, Obiechina determined to rebuild the device as a standalone product and take a look at whether or not it might serve different customers.
Kira lets customers provoke funds by means of WhatsApp utilizing textual content, voice notes or screenshots containing fee particulars. Its synthetic intelligence interprets these inputs and converts them into structured fee requests, decreasing the necessity to swap between apps.
But automating fee directions carries dangers. The system should appropriately interpret what a consumer intends earlier than cash strikes.
“If an agent misreads a message, you might owe someone an apology. If it misreads a transfer, that could be someone’s rent,” Obiechina says.
His method is to make use of AI to interpret directions with out giving it unchecked management over transactions. Authorisation and transaction guidelines stay specific, and Kira ought to ask customers to make clear ambiguous particulars somewhat than guess.
Obiechina says Kira has 14,000 customers and processed practically $2 million in transactions in a single month. Over the following yr, he goals to develop its consumer base past 100,000, introduce worldwide transfers and increase into different African markets.
Learning to construct past the code
Building an organization has modified the best way Obiechina thinks in regards to the individuals he works with. He regrets shedding contact with a few of his former bosses. Now, as a founder, he’s studying useful classes in regards to the significance of the relationships that maintain a enterprise.
“A good relationship with your co-founder is more important than being right or wrong,” he says. “It is not worth it to [always] win the argument.”
For him, the stakes are greater than any single disagreement. An organization’s issues will change over time, however a breakdown within the relationship between its founders may be more durable to recuperate from. This is a lesson he needs to hold into the following stage of his profession as he works to develop Kira past Nigeria.
Obiechina can also be rethinking what he needs his work to quantity to. Rather than construct one thing just because he can, he needs to create merchandise helpful sufficient to earn a long-lasting place in individuals’s lives.
“I want to build things people find useful enough to return to,” he says. “That matters more to me than having a product that only looks impressive when I’m showing it to someone.”
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