Building Y-Queue took Emmanuel Obiechina and his co-founders just three weeks. Convincing people to use it proved to be an entirely different education.

Long before he conceived Kira AI, his WhatsApp-based banking and payments platform, Obiechina saw a straightforward engineering solution to a persistent campus problem. At the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), students routinely struggled to order meals from restaurants scattered across the university town in Enugu State. Y-Queue was designed as his parting gift to the student body: an on-demand bridge between hungry undergraduates and local kitchens, with the ambition of eventually serving the wider food-delivery market across Enugu city.

On a screen, the product was seamless. On the ground, the friction of physical logistics quickly took over. Clean code could route an order in milliseconds, but it could not force overwhelmed kitchen staff to prepare meals faster, guarantee that dispatch riders would arrive on time or persuade cash-conscious students that convenience was worth an additional delivery fee.

Obiechina entered the venture with years of programming experience and a record of shipping software for international engineering teams. Yet Y-Queue confronted him with operational chaos that no algorithm could optimise away.

“Programming is actually the easy part,” Obiechina reflects. “The difficult part of building a company is what happens after you have built it.”

The experience changed how Obiechina thought about technology and the businesses built around it. It also shaped Kira, the payments startup that grew out of a problem he encountered while managing transfers to Y-Queue’s restaurants and dispatch riders.

But his path to building products of his own began with a decision to pursue a career his family had not planned for him.

Growing up, Obiechina’s future appeared to be mapped out. His father, a driven real estate professional, expected his son to follow him into the family trade by studying civil engineering. For years, Obiechina accepted that plan without question.

That changed in 2016, during a conversation with his cousin, a UNN alumnus who was then working in banking. The cousin introduced him to the emerging potential of the software industry. Obiechina knew virtually nothing about writing code, but what he heard was enough to overturn his plans.

“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.” JAMB, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, administers the entrance examinations used for admission into Nigerian universities.

The sudden change created tension at home. His father was furious and accused the cousin of steering his son toward an uncertain gamble. He eventually allowed Obiechina to make own choice, but with a blunt caveat: Obiechina would be entering a world his father knew nothing about and would have no family guidance.

“I told my father, ‘This is my life. This is what I want to do,’” Obiechina recalls.

In 2017, he received his admission letter to study Electronic Engineering at UNN. He began a five-year journey at the Nsukka campus that would establish his technical foundation.

Learning to build

Programming did not immediately become the centre of Obiechina’s university experience. He was elected class representative, a role that competed with the time he wanted to spend learning how to code. For a while, he put programming aside to focus on his duties and grades.

That changed in his third year. A friend with whom he had begun learning programming before university became a Google Developer Expert, one of the developers Google recognises for proven expertise in its technologies. Watching his friend’s progress prompted Obiechina to reconsider 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 representative and returned to coding. In an effort to catch up, he sometimes spent 14 to 15 hours a day in front of his laptop.

“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 urgency soon pushed him beyond simply learning to code. During the second semester of his third year, Obiechina began developing a product inspired by a problem he had experienced firsthand. While living in Nsukka, he could not watch films that were still showing in cinemas because the town had no cinema of its own at the time, according to 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 found LD Ventures, an incubator that offered mentorship and financial support, and contacted its founder through LinkedIn. The founder took an interest, connected Obiechina with a network of technology talent and guided him through product development. Together, they refined the app, met people in the film industry and eventually secured a partnership with a cinema.

The platform struggled to gain traction, however. Obiechina says some cinemas viewed it as a threat to their businesses, particularly to the additional revenue they earned from popcorn and other purchases made by moviegoers.

In hindsight, he also questions whether he made a convincing enough case for the idea.

“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 eventually moved on to focus on improving his programming skills. By his final year at UNN, that effort had begun to pay off.

From mobile apps to electric cars

Obiechina joined Dropezy, a delivery startup operating in Indonesia and backed by Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator behind companies such as Airbnb and Dropbox, as a Flutter developer. The company was building a platform designed to deliver orders to customers within 15 minutes. According to Obiechina, the team built its mobile app from scratch in under six weeks.

In 2022, he spent seven months at Dropezy, working with engineers from the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries. He considers it one of the periods when he learned fastest.

“I think that was actually the period where I felt I learned the fastest within the shortest period,” he says.

The experience, he says, taught him more than he could have learned by coding alone. Although he had spent long hours teaching himself programming, working alongside more experienced engineers showed him how software was built in a professional environment.

“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. The German software startup built products for automotive companies. Within three months, he says, he was promoted and given responsibility for his own project.

He later led development of an in-car app store for Togg, Turkey’s electric vehicle (EV) maker, for its T10X electric SUV. Built with Flutter, Google’s open-source framework for building cross-platform applications, the software brought app-based functionality into the vehicle. It presented a different challenge from the mobile applications he had worked on at Dropezy, a quick-commerce startup built around delivering small orders at speed.

At Smart-iX, the team was developing software for cars, a field with fewer established examples than conventional mobile-app development.

“We were practically inventing things,” he says.

Obiechina also worked on SmartLiving, an application that connected a user’s home and vehicle. It could detect when someone was leaving home and switch off the lights, or recognise when they were approaching and allow them to turn household devices on.

Within two months of joining Smart-iX, Obiechina says he rewrote SmartLiving’s legacy codebase, helping the company secure deals it had been losing. Togg later acquired the SmartLiving product, and Obiechina moved to the EV company with the team.

Working at Smart-iX and Togg taught him to move quickly, communicate clearly and treat problems with urgency. These were habits he would later try to instil in his own team.

“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 a problem close to home

Even while working on software for EVs, Obiechina faced a more immediate problem: getting food 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 wondered whether he could create something better for his community. Alongside two friends from university, he started Y-Queue, a food-delivery startup connecting customers with restaurants 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 end of 2023, Obiechina had left his job at Togg to focus on Y-Queue. The company started in Nsukka, Enugu, before expanding across the city.

Initially, Y-Queue was a conventional food-delivery app. The team later reworked it into a video-based platform where customers could discover meals through short clips and order directly from what they watched.

Restaurants had walk-in customers to serve, riders wanted to maximise their earnings and customers expected affordable delivery. For the next two years, Obiechina and his co-founders grappled with these competing demands 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 experience influenced what he wanted to build next. “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 assets, according to Obiechina. The team had achieved its goal of testing whether it could build a viable business in Nigeria’s 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 problem that became Kira

Kira grew out of a problem Obiechina encountered while running Y-Queue. When the company’s accountant became unavailable, he took over payments to restaurants and dispatch riders, sometimes making transfers to more than 50 people a day.

“I instantly knew this [could not] be my life,” he said. “There had to be an easier way to do these payments.”

The process required him to switch between WhatsApp, where recipients sent their account details, and his banking app, where he made transfers before returning to WhatsApp to share receipts. Obiechina built a tool that allowed him to forward account details to Kira on WhatsApp and initiate payments. Other members of the finance team soon began using it as well.

After Y-Queue’s product-and-asset acquisition in August 2025, Obiechina decided to rebuild the tool as a standalone product and test whether it could serve other users.

Kira allows users to initiate payments through WhatsApp using text, voice notes or screenshots containing payment details. Its artificial intelligence interprets those inputs and converts them into structured payment requests, reducing the need to switch between applications.

Kira’s WhatsApp-centric design mirrors how its home market already communicates: WhatsApp is Nigeria’s most widely used messaging platform, and small businesses routinely handle orders, invoices and customer conversations through chats — everyday behaviour in one of Africa’s most active fintech markets.

Automating payment instructions carries risks, however. The system must correctly interpret a user’s intent before money moves. Ensuring that software reads intent correctly has become a defining design question as startups across the industry hand AI systems real financial tasks.

“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 approach is to use AI to interpret instructions without giving it unchecked control over transactions. Authorisation and transaction rules remain explicit, and Kira should ask users to clarify ambiguous details rather than guess.

Obiechina says Kira has 14,000 users and processed nearly $2 million in transactions in a single month. Over the next year, he aims to grow its user base beyond 100,000, introduce international transfers and expand into other African markets. Those targets will offer an early read on whether the lesson he carried out of Y-Queue — fewer moving parts — translates to a business whose core task is interpreting human intent.

Learning to build beyond the code

Building a company has changed how Obiechina thinks about the people he works with. He regrets losing touch with some of his former bosses. Now, as a founder, he is learning lessons about the importance of relationships that sustain a business.

“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 bigger than any single disagreement. A company’s problems will change over time, but a breakdown in the relationship between its founders can be harder to recover from. He wants to carry that lesson into the next stage of his career as he works to grow Kira beyond Nigeria.

Obiechina is also reconsidering what he wants his work to amount to. Rather than build something simply because he can, he wants to create products useful enough to earn a lasting place in people’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.”