Andela raises $40m to bridge talent gap, develop Africa’s tech ecosystem

Andela has announced that the company has secured $40M in Series C funding to further build capacity of developers towards solving both African and global problems.
The round, which marks one of the largest investments ever led by an African venture firm into an Africa-based company, brings Andela’s total venture funding to just over $80M.

Andela hopes to use the capital to fuel its aggressive expansion plans of launching offices in two additional African countries over the next year and doubling its developer base from 500 to 1,000.

According to the company that builds engineering teams with Africa’s most talented software developers, the investment was led by pan-African venture firm CRE Venture Capital with participation from DBL Partners, Amplo, Salesforce Ventures, and Africa-focused TLcom Capital.

Existing investors including Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, and Spark Capital also participated. Alongside this round, Pule Taukobong of CRE, Julia Gillard, former Australian Prime Minister and Amplo Board Partner, and Omobola Johnson, Senior Partner at TLcom and former Minister of Communication Technology in Nigeria, will be joining Andela’s board.

With an estimated 1.3M software jobs unfilled in 2016 in the U.S. alone, the growth of today’s major technology ecosystems inhibited by a severe lack of talent, has led Andela to invest in high potential pools of brainpower across the African continent to help more than 100 partner companies build distributed engineering teams.

These partners range from industry leaders like Viacom and Mastercard Labs to high-growth technology companies such as Gusto and GitHub.

“Andela is investing in our continent’s future technology leaders, who are already playing a much-needed role in solving both African and global problems,” says Seni Sulyman, Country Director of Andela Nigeria.

“With each new partnership, we are simultaneously proving to the global tech industry that brilliance is evenly distributed irrespective of gender, culture or nationality. As we unleash an entire generation of technologists, we will secure Africa’s role as an equal partner working alongside the rest of the world to advance human potential”, he added.