Building Y-Queue took Emmanuel Obiechina and his co-founders simply three weeks. Convincing individuals to make use of it proved to be a completely totally different schooling.
Long earlier than he conceived Kira AI—his WhatsApp-based banking and funds platform—Obiechina noticed a clear engineering resolution 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 present 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 rapidly took over. Clean code might route a ticket in milliseconds, however it couldn’t pressure overwhelmed kitchen workers to prep meals quicker, assure dispatch riders arrived on time, or persuade cash-conscious college students that comfort was value an additional supply payment.
Obiechina had entered the enterprise with years of programming expertise and a observe 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 thought of 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 choice 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 comply with 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 trade. Obiechina knew nearly 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 speedy pressure at residence. 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 can be strolling right into a world his father knew nothing about, fully with out household steering.
“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 may form his technical basis.
Learning to construct
At UNN, programming didn’t instantly turn out to be the centre of Obiechina’s college expertise. He was elected class consultant, a task that competed with the time he needed to spend studying how you can code. For some time, he put programming apart to concentrate on his duties and grades.
His third yr introduced a change. A pal with whom he had began studying programming earlier than college turned a Google Developer Expert. Observing his pal’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 typically 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 rapidly pushed him past simply studying to code. In his third yr, second semester, Obiechina started growing a product impressed by an issue he had skilled firsthand: he couldn’t watch movies nonetheless exhibiting in cinemas whereas dwelling in Nsukka, which had no cinema of its personal on the time, in accordance 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, related him with a community of tech expertise, and guided him by way of product growth. Together, they refined the app, met individuals within the movie trade, and ultimately secured a partnership with a cinema.
But the platform struggled to achieve traction. Obiechina says some cinemas seen it as a menace to their enterprise, notably the extra income they earned from popcorn and different purchases by moviegoers.
In hindsight, he additionally wonders whether or not he did not 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 concentrate on bettering his programming expertise. And by his closing yr at UNN, that effort had begun to repay.
From cell apps to electrical automobiles
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 clients inside quarter-hour. According to Obiechina, the workforce constructed its cell app from scratch in below six weeks.
In 2022, he spent seven months at Dropezy, working alongside engineers from the United Kingdom, the United States, and different nations. He considers this one of many intervals 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 accordance 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 inbuilt knowledgeable setting.
“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 firms. Within three months, he says, he was promoted and given duty for his personal challenge.
He later led the event of an in-car app retailer for Togg, Turkey’s electrical automobile (EV) maker, for its T10X electrical SUV. Built with Flutter, the open-source coding software, the software program allowed the workforce to carry app-based performance into the automobile, a special problem from the cell functions he had labored on at Dropezy, a quick-commerce startup. At Smart-iX, the place he labored on the Togg challenge, the workforce was constructing software program for automobiles, a area with fewer established examples to attract on than typical cell app growth.
“We were practically inventing things,” he says.
Obiechina additionally labored on SmartLiving, an utility that related a person’s residence and automobile. It might detect when somebody was leaving residence and change off the lights, or recognise after they had been approaching and allow them to flip family gadgets 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 dropping. Togg later acquired the SmartDwelling product, and Obiechina moved to the EV firm with the workforce.
Working at Smart-iX and Togg taught him to maneuver rapidly, talk clearly, and deal with issues with urgency. These had been habits he would later attempt to instil in his personal workforce.
“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 residence
Even whereas engaged on software program for EVs, Obiechina confronted a extra speedy 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 group. Alongside two associates from the college, he began Y-Queue, a meals supply startup that connects clients 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 top of 2023, Obiechina left his job at Togg to concentrate on Y-Queue, which began in Nsukka, Enugu, earlier than increasing throughout town.
Initially, Y-Queue was a standard food-delivery app. The workforce later reworked it right into a video-based platform the place clients might uncover meals by way of brief clips and order instantly from what they watched.
Restaurants had walk-in clients to serve, riders needed to maximise their earnings, and clients 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 accordance with Obiechina. The workforce 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 turned Kira
Kira grew out of an issue Obiechina encountered whereas working Y-Queue. When the corporate’s accountant turned unavailable, he took over funds to eating places and dispatch riders, typically 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 software that permit him ahead account particulars to Kira on WhatsApp and provoke funds. Other members of the finance workforce quickly started utilizing it, too.
After Y-Queue’s product-and-asset acquisition in August 2025, Obiechina determined to rebuild the software as a standalone product and take a look at whether or not it might serve different customers.
Kira lets customers provoke funds by way of WhatsApp utilizing textual content, voice notes or screenshots containing cost particulars. Its synthetic intelligence interprets these inputs and converts them into structured cost requests, decreasing the necessity to change between apps.
But automating cost directions carries dangers. The system should appropriately interpret what a person 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 express, and Kira ought to ask customers to make clear ambiguous particulars relatively 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 person base past 100,000, introduce worldwide transfers and broaden into different African markets.
Learning to construct past the code
Building an organization has modified the way in which Obiechina thinks concerning the individuals he works with. He regrets dropping contact with a few of his former bosses. Now, as a founder, he’s studying useful classes concerning 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 will be tougher to get well from. This is a lesson he desires to hold into the following stage of his profession as he works to develop Kira past Nigeria.
Obiechina can also be rethinking what he desires his work to quantity to. Rather than construct one thing just because he can, he desires to create merchandise helpful sufficient to earn an enduring 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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