How Y-Queue’s Payment Challenges Led to the Creation of Kira

Emmanuel Obiechina’s experience building and operating a food-delivery startup in Nsukka has led to the creation of Kira, a WhatsApp-based payments platform designed to simplify how users initiate transactions.

Obiechina and two university friends built Y-Queue to connect customers with restaurants and dispatch riders in Nsukka, Enugu State. The startup initially operated as a conventional food-delivery application before being redesigned as a video-based platform for discovering and ordering meals.

“Programming is actually the easy part. The difficult part of building a company is what happens after you have built it,” Obiechina said, reflecting on the operational demands of running the business.

From Nsukka to food delivery

Y-Queue began in Nsukka and later expanded across Enugu city. The founders built the first version in three weeks, but persuading customers to use the service proved more difficult, according to the account of the company’s development.

Obiechina left his job at Togg by the end of 2023 to concentrate on Y-Queue. Before that, he had worked at Dropezy as a Flutter developer for seven months in 2022. He joined Smart-iX in September 2022 and said he was promoted within three months.

At Smart-iX, he led development of an in-car app store for Togg’s T10X electric SUV. Togg later acquired SmartLiving, an application that connected a user’s home and vehicle. Obiechina said he rewrote SmartLiving’s legacy codebase within two months.

By August 2025, Y-Queue had been acquired in a deal involving its product and assets, according to Obiechina. The financial terms, buyer and exact date of the transaction were not provided.

A payment problem becomes a product

Kira emerged from the difficulties of paying Y-Queue’s restaurants and dispatch riders. When the company’s accountant became unavailable, Obiechina took over the payment work and sometimes had to send money to more than 50 recipients in a day.

To manage the workload, he built an internal tool that allowed account details sent through WhatsApp to be used to initiate payments. After Y-Queue’s product-and-asset acquisition, he rebuilt that tool as Kira, a standalone product.

Kira allows users to submit payment instructions through WhatsApp using text, voice notes or screenshots containing payment details. Its artificial intelligence interprets the information and converts it into structured payment requests.

Obiechina said the system uses explicit authorisation requirements and transaction rules. Where an instruction is unclear, Kira should ask the user for clarification rather than proceed on an ambiguous request.

“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.

Expansion plans

Obiechina says Kira has 14,000 users and processed nearly $2 million in transactions in a single month. Those figures are based on his account and were not independently verified in the source.

Over the next year, he aims to grow Kira’s user base beyond 100,000, introduce international transfers and expand into other African markets. The source does not establish whether those planned services or expansion efforts have begun.

Obiechina’s route into software began during his university years. After initially intending to study civil engineering, he changed his JAMB course choice to electronic engineering in 2016 and was admitted to study Electronic Engineering at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 2017.

He has said that a cousin working in banking introduced him to the software industry. During his third year, he returned to programming with a determination to catch up, sometimes coding for 14 to 15 hours a day.

That experience, followed by the practical demands of running Y-Queue, shaped his approach to product development. “I want to build things people find useful enough to return to,” Obiechina said.