Wednesday, Jan 23, Andela announced the completion of its $100 million Series D funding. A funding round that roped in Generation Investment Management, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Spark Capital, GV, and the CRE Venture Capital. With this Series D funding, Andela’s total venture funding now stands at $180 million.
The Series D funds will go towards building distributed engineering teams made up of top software developers Africa has to offer. The funds will be used to accelerate Andela’s technology platform and identify, develop, and match talent as scale.
Hence, Andela will be able to provide its clients with the data they need to understand the (Andela’s) developers performance and enable them (the clients) better manage the distributed teams. The fund will also help Andela in spreading its wings further across the African continent, as it seeks to match the growing demand for high-quality engineers from the international market.
“It’s increasingly clear that the future of work will be distributed, in part due to the severe shortage of engineering talent,” said Jeremy Johnson, a co-founder and CEO of Andela.
“Given our access to incredible talent across Africa, as well as what we’ve learned from scaling hundreds of engineering teams around the world, Andela is able to provide the talent and the technology to power high-performing teams and help companies adopt the distributed model faster.”
Joshua Mwaniki, the Country Director at Andela Kenya added: “Kenya, and the African continent is pivotal to the growth of our increasingly digital world. In four years, Andela has integrated Kenyan technologies with hundreds of leading engineering teams around the world. This latest round of funding enables us to continue scaling and innovating with technology, whilst also helping define Africa’s future in the tech landscape.”
Lilly Wollman, the Co-Head of Growth Equity at Generation Investment Management said, “Generation’s investment in Andela resulted from our deep research into the future of work. We believe Andela is a transformational model to develop software engineers and deploy them at scale into the future enterprise. The global demand for software engineers far exceeds supply, and that gap is projected to widen. Andela’s leading technology enables firms to effectively build and manage distributed engineering teams. We are great admirers of the outstanding team, mission, and culture Andela has built across two continents and five countries.”
Andela’s tech campuses are currently only available in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. With the Series D funding, the company is now looking at establishing more centers across the continent.
It is interesting to note that Andela was recognized as ‘The Best Place to Work in Africa’ last year. Also in 2018, The Wall Street Journal listed Andela among the 25 tech companies to watch. In 2017, Fast Company ranked Andela as the topmost innovative company in Africa.
Experts also project that by the end of 2019, Andela will have doubled in size, hired an extra 1,000 engineers, and invested heavily in product development, engineering, and data.
