26th May, 2017 – Andela the Nigerian-based innovative software training company which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has invested $24-million in – is opening its third African headquarters in Uganda. Andela already operates tech campuses in Nigeria and Kenya.
Andela was launched in 2014 to solve “the shortage of high-quality talent,” its CEO Jeremy Johnson told me. “Three years ago we started Andela to build a network of top software developers across the African continent and bridge the divide between the US and African tech sectors. To say the least, it’s been a crazy run – 60,000 applicants later, we’ve shown a few people that engineers can look a little different.”
During a surprise visit to Africa last August, Zuckerberg said of the continent: “This is where the future is going to be built”. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative invested $24-million in the Andela training program in June 2016 as part of its Series B funding, along with GV (Google Ventures). Andela has raised $39-million in total, including its Series A round in June 2015, which was led by Spark Capital and included existing investors Founder Collective, Learn Capital, Omidyar Network, and Africa based CRE Ventures.
“The thing that’s striking [about Lagos] is the energy, the entrepreneurial energy,” Zuckerberg said at the time. “There’s this energy here, you feel it as soon as you get off the place. The world needs to see that. Here is Lagos, and across the continent, things are really shifting. Things are moving from a resource-based economy and its shifting to entrepreneurial, knowledge-based economy. It’s not only shaping the country but the whole continent.” Zuckerberg also visited Kenya, which he praised as the “world leader” in mobile money.
Johnson told me Andela is “trying to solve two separate, giant, complicated problems at the same time. In Africa, we’re working to increase the technical capacity of getting a critical mass of talented developers in one place. Andela is solving that.
“Internationally, we’re working to reduce the challenges companies face trying to hire technical talent. There are currently five open jobs for every developer looking for one in the U.S. alone, and it’s estimated there will be 1.3-million software development jobs created in the next 10 years with only 400,000 [U.S.] domestic computer science grads to fill them. Andela developers are the kind of people who, had they been born in India, would have ended up at the IIT’s, or in the US, MIT and Cal Tech. To have the opportunity to work with these kinds of people is a privilege that our partner companies appreciate.”
He adds: “In three years, we’ve grown from a founding team of six to just over 600 employees worldwide. 400 of those are developers, the majority of whom are working as full-time engineering team members at leading tech companies around the world. The success stories usually start with a company being critical of this new model they’ve never heard of, but giving it a try because a friend of theirs is already doing it and says the engineers are great. Two months later, they reach out and say ‘Wait a minute, are there more developers like this? The best engineer on my team is a young woman from Nairobi, how did this happen?’ Those are our favorite stories.”
