Start-up builds talent pipeline from Africa
TECH COMPANY ANDELA HAS ATTRACTED SOME TOP INVESTORS
When Tolulope Komolafe first heard the pitch, she was sceptical. A fledgling company in Lagos, Nigeria, would pay her to learn how to write modern computer code and then offer her a good job in the hightech economy.
“I thought it was a con,” she recalled. “Too good to be true.”
After inquiring, Komolafe found the offer was real. Today, she is a software developer, working remotely from Lagos for a start-up in New York, and she dreams of starting her own tech company someday.
Komolafe, a 27-year-old Nigerian, is one of hundreds of young Africans who have joined Andela, a fast-growing start-up based in New York that has attracted the attention and money of people like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and works with bluechip companies like MasterCard.
The company’s ambitious agenda spans education, economic development and moneymaking. It is betting on its ability to build out a talent pipeline of African software developers to the United States and elsewhere, tapping into a continent eager to connect to the global digital economy.
Jeremy Johnson, Andela’s chief executive, says the company offers “a very different model for unlocking human potential.”
The animating idea behind Andela, founded in 2014, is that Africa has plenty of smart people but that they too often lack the preparation for and pathways to gainful jobs — the missing ingredients that Andela can provide in the field of software development.
Not only does Andela instruct people in person, but 20,000 aspiring programmers across Africa have used its free online learning and training tools. By 2024, Andela hopes to have helped prepare 100,000 software developers in Africa for jobs, including thousands working for Andela.
After six months of paid training, the Andela employees become remote members of software development teams at companies. The current roster of 112 customers includes Viacom, MasterCard Labs, GitHub and SeatGeek in the United States and clients in 10 other countries.
“This is a platform for giving people who want to learn and succeed access and opportunity,” said Seni Sulyman, a 32-year-old graduate of Harvard Business School, who is the country director for Andela in Nigeria.
The challenge for Andela will be expanding its model to meet its lofty growth targets. “Andela has delivered on its promise so far, but can it keep finding high-quality talent and finding relevant employment for them as it gets bigger?” asked Aniedi UdoObong, a Google programme manager who works with software developers in Africa.
Andela’s growth plans got an enthusiastic endorsement last week from its financial backers, with a $40 million (Dh146 million) round of venture funding that lifts the total the company has raised to $80 million. The new investment was announced Tuesday.
The start-up has attracted a group of top investors that find both its business model and its mission appealing, including GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Spark Capital. It was also the first lead investment for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, set up in 2015 to eventually invest most of their Facebook wealth to “advance human potential and promote equality.”
Andela began with a founding team of six — three Africans, two Americans and a Canadian — and an initial test class of four students. It now employs 800 people, and expects to double that in the next year. While its headquarters are in New York with an office in San Francisco, 90 per cent of its workers are in Africa, with offices in Lagos; Nairobi, Kenya; and Kampala, Uganda.