Andela, a company which trains developers in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda for contract work with U.S. companies, has secured $100 million (Ksh10 billion) in Series D funding to build distributed Engineering teams around the world.
The funding was led by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management with participation from existing investors including Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, Spark Capital, and CRE Venture Capital.
“It’s increasingly clear that the future of work will be distributed, in part due to the severe shortage of engineering talent,” says Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Andela.
“Given our access to incredible talent across Africa, as well as what we’ve learned from scaling hundreds of engineering teams around the world, Andela is able to provide the talent and the technology to power high-performing teams and help companies adopt the distributed model faster.”
The company has about 1,100 developers on staff working for more than 200 companies, nearly 90 percent of which are located in the U.S.
“Kenya, and the African continent is pivotal to the growth of our increasingly digital world,” says Joshua Mwaniki, Country Director at Andela Kenya. “In four years, Andela has integrated Kenyan technologists with hundreds of leading engineering teams around the world. This latest round of funding enables us to continue scaling and innovating with technology, whilst also helping define Africa’s future in the tech landscape.”
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“Generation’s investment in Andela resulted from our deep research into the future of work. We believe Andela is a transformational model to develop software engineers and deploy them at scale into the future enterprise,” says Lilly Wollman, Co-Head of Growth Equity at Generation Investment Management.
“The global demand for software engineers far exceeds supply, and that gap is projected to widen. Andela’s leading technology enables firms to effectively build and manage distributed engineering teams. We are great admirers of the outstanding team, mission and culture Andela has built across two continents and five countries.”
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So far, Andela’s venture capital totals to $180 million (Ksh18 billion), after raising $24 million (Ksh2.4 billion) from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative in 2016 and another $40 million (Ksh4 billion) in 2017 led by African VC firm, CRE Venture Capital, with participation from GV (Google’s VC arm), the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital, DBL Partners, Amplo, and TLcom Capital.
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