Connecting African IT & Software Developers With Top Tech Companies
Andela, a business that aims to connect-up Africa’s top software developers with technology companies around the world, has raised $100 million in a new round of funding.
The new financing from Generation Investment Management (the investment fund which was co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore) puts the business valuation between $600 million and $700 million.
Notably, the startup has gained the attention of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who visited the Lagos campus in 2016. The Chan-Zuckerberg initiative, which has education among its core areas of focus, led a $24million (£18.5million) investment in the company, joined by Google Ventures and Spark Capital and the Omidyar Network.
Founded in 2014, by Sass, Jeremy Johnson, Ian Carnevale and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Andela has campuses in Lagos and Nairobi, and is growing rapidly; the company has already enrolled 400 developers in its training scheme from more than 60,000 applicants.
This week, Andela has announced it is expanding yet again, into Kampala, Uganda. "Over the past year, we analysed every country on the continent with a population size over 3 million, looking at a series of metrics including Internet penetration, education rates, and median age.
Uganda is home to 40 million people with an average age of 25, the second-youngest population in the world, and Kampala alone counts more than twelve technology hubs,” says Johnson.
The rise of workplace tools like Slack, as well as developer environments that allow for remote collaboration and sharing, mean that developers no longer need to be in the same country, let alone the same office, to work together, says Johnson.
“It's a growing trend, over the last half decade in particular, of the ability to really quantify the output of what a software developer is able to do,” says Johnson. “It goes from 'who's the best person in a 20-mile radius' to 'who's the best person, period?'”
More than 60 per cent of developers, the company says, now work from home at least one day per month. With the world-wide demand for IT and software engineers far exceeding supply Andela helps businesses to overcome the technologist supply issues.
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