Andela

Andela runs a two-sided marketplace for technical talent. It recruits, assesses and onboards engineers from roughly 135 countries, about 60% of them in Africa and Latin America, and places them in long-term remote roles with employers such as GitHub, Mastercard and Mindshare. The company was founded in 2014 by Jeremy Johnson, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Nadayar Enegesi, Brice Nkengsa, Ian Carnevale and Christina Sass, and announced its 2021 financing from New York. It began in Lagos with a four-year fellowship for junior engineers, opened hiring to mid-level and senior engineers in 2019, and went fully remote in 2020. Its network now counts more than 150,000 technology professionals.

Andela raised a $10 million Series A in June 2015 led by Spark Capital, with seed investors participating. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative led a $24 million Series B in 2016, its first lead investment. In October 2017 CRE Venture Capital, a South African firm, led a $40 million Series C, taking total funding to $80 million. Generation Investment Management led a $100 million Series D in January 2019 with participation from Serena Ventures, bringing venture funding to $180 million. On September 29, 2021 Andela announced a $200 million Series E led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with new investor Whale Rock and existing investors Generation Investment Management, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Spark Capital. Lydia Jett of SoftBank Investment Advisers joined the board. The company's 2021 release also listed Google Ventures among its backers.

The Series E valued Andela at $1.5 billion, and Andela described itself as the first unicorn talent marketplace. Since then it has bought assessment and talent businesses: Qualified, a developer assessment platform, in March 2023; Casana, a Munich-based IT talent network, in May 2023; and Woven, a technical assessment company, in January 2026. Carrol Chang, a former Uber executive who ran global driver and courier operations, became chief executive in August 2024. The company now positions itself around AI engineering and training, and says it has trained about 200,000 technologists since 2014.

For investors, Andela shows how a company that began as a training program in one African city attracted global venture and growth capital in stages. Spark Capital entered at the Series A and was still participating six years later in the Series E. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Generation Investment Management each led a round and followed on, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 entered at the unicorn round. No public listing or sale has followed. Backers who entered in 2015 have held for more than a decade, and the most recent priced valuation on record dates to 2021, before the company moved its model toward AI talent and assessments.