Emmanuel Obiechina’s journey from co-founding a food-delivery startup in Nsukka to building a WhatsApp-based payments platform was shaped by the operational difficulties he encountered while running his first company.

Table Of Content

From engineering student to software developer
A payment problem becomes a new product
Growth plans for Kira

Obiechina and two university friends created Y-Queue to connect customers in Nsukka with restaurants and dispatch riders. The team built the first version in three weeks, initially operating as a conventional food-delivery service before developing it into a video-based platform for discovering and ordering meals.

“I just felt there has to be a way for delivery to work here. Now that I am still here, why not build something for this environment before I leave?” Obiechina said, explaining the decision to launch Y-Queue.

From engineering student to software developer

Obiechina said a conversation with his cousin, a University of Nigeria, Nsukka alumnus working in banking, introduced him to the software industry. In 2016, he changed his intended university course from civil engineering to electronic engineering. He received admission to study Electronic Engineering at UNN in 2017.

He initially served as a class representative but later resigned during his third year after the role took time away from programming. He returned to coding and developed a cinema-related product after observing that, according to his account, Nsukka had no cinema at the time. The product struggled to gain traction because some cinemas considered it a threat to their businesses.

Obiechina later worked as a Flutter developer at Dropezy for seven months in 2022. He joined Smart-iX in September that year and worked on software projects including an in-car app store for Togg’s T10X electric SUV. He said he was promoted within three months of joining Smart-iX and given responsibility for his own project.

By the end of 2023, he had left Togg to concentrate on Y-Queue. The founders spent two years working to make the business commercially viable, dealing with challenges involving restaurant preparation, rider availability, delivery costs and customer expectations.

A payment problem becomes a new product

While running Y-Queue, Obiechina took over payment responsibilities after the company’s accountant became unavailable. He sometimes had to transfer money to more than 50 people a day, including restaurants and dispatch riders.

That experience led him to create a payment-management tool that could initiate transfers through WhatsApp. “I instantly knew this [could not] be my life. There had to be an easier way to do these payments,” he said.

Y-Queue was acquired in August 2025 in a product-and-asset deal, according to Obiechina. The buyer and financial terms were not identified. After the acquisition, he rebuilt the internal payment tool as a standalone product called Kira.

Kira allows users to start payment requests through WhatsApp using written messages, voice notes or screenshots containing payment information. The platform uses artificial intelligence to interpret those instructions and convert them into structured payment requests, while authorization and transaction rules remain explicit.

Obiechina has highlighted the risks involved in automating financial instructions. “If an agent misreads a message, you might owe someone an apology. If it misreads a transfer, that could be someone’s rent,” he said.

Growth plans for Kira

Obiechina said Kira has 14,000 users and processed nearly $2 million in transactions during one month. Those figures were provided by him and were not independently verified in the source report.

He aims to take the platform beyond 100,000 users over the next year, introduce international transfers and expand into other African markets. The plans have not been independently verified.

For Obiechina, the experience of building Y-Queue reinforced the difference between creating software and operating a company. “Programming is actually the easy part. The difficult part of building a company is what happens after you have built it,” he said.