The startup says it’s booming after pivoting from training junior developers to placing senior engineers with global companies.
Andela, a startup that connects African software engineering talent to companies globally, has raised $200 million from investors led by SoftBank, in a series E funding round that values the company at $1.5 billion.
Seven-year-old Andela is the latest Africa-focused startup to attain “unicorn” status — a billion-dollar valuation for a private company — this year. Fintech startups Flutterwave and OPay, in Nigeria, and Wave, in Senegal, have each earned 10-figure valuations with their most recent funding rounds, as investor interest and deal flow in the region reach unprecedented levels.
A new investor, Boston-based hedge fund Whale Rock, joined existing backers, including Generation Investment Management, Spark Capital, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in the round.
Andela first opened shop in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2014, with the explicit aim of addressing an acute shortage of software developers and engineers in Africa. It settled on a model where it selected and trained engineers in an intense six-month boot camp and then placed them at global companies in junior developer roles. At the time, most tech companies operating in Africa hired few or no engineers in their home markets, instead, their technical staff worked out of hubs in the U.K., Portugal, or Eastern Europe.
Between 2014 and 2019, over 130,000 applicants joined Andela’s six-month training program at boot camps in four African countries — Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. The potential social impact of training hundreds of African developers generated buzz internationally and attracted big-name investors, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; tennis star Serena Williams; and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s investment fund, Generation Investment Management.
Source: restofworld.org