Andela Targets Expansion After $100m Fundraiser

• Andela Targets Expansion After $100m Fundraiser

Tech startup, Andela, is poised to boost the number of its African software developers working on projects for firms across the world in tenfold. Its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jeremy Johnson explains the strategy to African Business.

With its cosy nap-pods, outdoor yoga and exercise area and cushioned canoe sofa said to evoke New York’s Hudson River, the trendy north Lagos office of Andela appears to have been lifted straight out of Silicon Valley.

Yet, amid the open plan desks and side-offices where you would expect to find coders straight out of Stanford or MIT, ambitious Nigerian software developers knuckle down on projects for companies based thousands of miles away.

Founded in 2014 and with additional campuses in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, Andela’s ambitious goal is to train distributed software teams from scratch, using African talent before hiring them out to work on projects for international clients.

After five years of rapid growth, culminating in the hiring of some 1,100 developers across the continent, Andela’s unashamedly private sector model has attracted the backing and financial support of some of the US’s most prominent investment luminaries.

The firm is set to embark on the next phase of its expansion, following the completion of a $100million funding round in January led by former US Vice-President Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and supported by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and others, bringing total venture funding to $180million.

Yet with high-profile investors comes a new level of pressure and scrutiny as the firm attempts to boost tenfold the number of its African developers while proving to a sceptical world that the continent’s development talent can compete on an international level.

Speaking to African Business, co-founder and CEO Jeremy Johnson says that the software world is rapidly waking up to the vast untapped potential of Africa’s development talent.

“Over the past five years there’s been a significant shift to comfort with remote and distributed software development teams and we’ve spent a lot of time helping companies to do that wel…’’