ÁNDALE, ANDELA: Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and chief executive of Andela, has a big vision—and now he’s getting the funding that he needs to grow into a reality.
Johnson announced this week that the New York City-based company has raised $100 million in a Series D round. He started Andela in 2014 to offer both coding instruction–and jobs—to students in developing countries. Andela started with a physical campus in Lagos, Nigeria. And since then, it has trained more than a thousand developers and has more than 200 paying customers.
“As the war for talent continues, there’s one macro trend that is both enabling Andela’s growth and powering many of the companies that have found a competitive edge: distributed work,” Johnson wrote in a blog post announcing the investment. And he adds: “This may sound crazy, but the majority of the world’s best engineers didn’t attend MIT or Stanford.”
Andela now runs its six-month long training programs at locations in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. Those who go through the program are placed to work with customers as a remote Andela employee. Andela charges customers between $50,000 to $120,000 per developer, TechCrunch reports. About a third of that goes to the individual developer; the rest covers training and Andela’s overhead. Coders pledge to stay with Andela for at least four years.
But a intriguing element that distinguishes Andela from other programs is that the company collects data on “developer fit,” and is building out systems to monitor how well Andela-trained developers are doing.
The fresh funds will help Andela build out those programs. The company also expects to double in size in 2019, hiring another 1,000 developers.
Leading this round is Generation Investment Management, founded in 2004 by seven partners including former Vice President Al Gore and long-time Goldman Sachs investor, David Blood, which invests in “sustainable” businesses including energy, health care and consumer goods. Existing Andela investors who returned partake in the round include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, Spark Capital and CRE Venture Capital. All together, Andela has raised $180 million in financing.
