ImpactAlpha, January 23 – Andela started in 2014 to train and hire African coders to fill global companies’ technical skills gaps. The company has secured $100 million in a Series D funding round led by Al Gore’s venture capital firm Generation Investment Management. Existing investors Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, Spark Capital, and CRE Venture Capital also backed the round.
The New York-based company has built up a team of 1,100 developers and software engineers, who work from four campuses in Africa for a range of companies—from media giant Viacom, to web hosting company GitHub, to meditation app Headspace. Andela intends to double its pool of engineers this year, Quartz Africa reports.
In the past, Andela’s founder Jeremy Johnson has spoken of “reversing age-old misconceptions about talent and potential” by training and remotely staffing African technologists at global companies. Now, his messaging is more about the “future of work,” which he believes will increasingly become distributed owing to “the severe shortage of engineering talent.”
While that may serve the workers Andela hires and global companies requiring their skills, models like Andela’s may make it harder for local companies to attract the technical talent they need because of their difficulty competing on pay and benefits.
