Why Emmanuel Obiechina ditched dedicated apps to build a bank inside your DMs

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 clean engineering solution to a persistent campus headache. 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, built with the ambition of eventually capturing the wider food delivery market across Enugu city.

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

Obiechina had entered the venture with years of programming experience and a track record of shipping software for international engineering teams. Yet Y-Queue confronted him with a brand of 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.”

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

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

Growing up, Obiechina’s future seemed already drawn on a blueprint. His father, a driven real estate professional, expected his son to follow his path into the family trade by studying civil engineering. For years, Obiechina accepted the script without question.

That changed in 2016 during a conversation with his cousin, a UNN alumnus then working in banking, who introduced him to the nascent promise of the software industry. Obiechina knew virtually nothing about writing code, but what he heard was enough 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 immediate tension at home. His father was furious, accusing the cousin of steering his son toward an uncertain gamble. While he eventually relented, allowing Obiechina to make his own choice, the concession came with a blunt caveat: he would be walking into a world his father knew nothing about, entirely without 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 UNN for Electronic Engineering, stepping onto the Nsukka campus to begin a five-year journey that would shape his technical foundation.

At UNN, 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.

His third year brought a change. A friend with whom he had started learning programming before university became a Google Developer Expert. Observing 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 a hurry to catch up, he sometimes spent 14 to 15 hours each 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 sense of urgency quickly pushed him beyond just learning to code. In his third year, second semester, Obiechina began developing a product inspired by a problem he had experienced firsthand: he could not watch films still showing in cinemas while living in Nsukka, which 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 reached out to its founder on LinkedIn. The founder took an interest, connected him with a network of tech 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.

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

In hindsight, he also wonders whether he failed to make 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. And by his final year at UNN, that effort had begun to pay off.

Obiechina joined Dropezy, a Y Combinator-backed delivery startup operating in Indonesia, as a Flutter developer. The company was building a platform designed to get 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 alongside engineers from the United Kingdom, the United States, and other countries. He considers this 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, according to him, taught him more than he could have learned coding alone. Though 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, a German software startup building products for automotive companies. Within three months, he says, he was promoted and given responsibility for his own project.

He later led the development of an in-car app store for Togg, Turkey’s electric vehicle (EV) maker, for its T10X electric SUV. Built with Flutter, the open-source coding tool, the software allowed the team to bring app-based functionality into the vehicle, a different challenge from the mobile applications he had worked on at Dropezy, a quick-commerce startup. At Smart-iX, where he worked on the Togg project, the team was building software for cars, a field with fewer established examples to draw on 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 let them 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.”

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 if he could create something better for his community. Alongside two friends from the university, he started Y-Queue, a food delivery startup that connects 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 left his job at Togg to focus on Y-Queue, which 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 would influence what he chose 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 what it set out to do: test whether it could build a viable business 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.

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 involved switching 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 let him forward account details to Kira on WhatsApp and initiate payments. Other members of the finance team soon began using it, too.

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

But automating payment instructions carries risks. The system must correctly interpret what a user intends before money moves.

“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.

Building a company has changed the way 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 valuable lessons about the importance of the 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. This is a lesson he wants to carry into the next stage of his career as he works to grow Kira beyond Nigeria.

Obiechina is also rethinking 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.”

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