by Jonathan Shieber (@jshieber)
Andela, a startup that trains developers in Africa and hires them out to global tech companies, has raised $40 million in Series C funding.
The financing came from CRE Venture Capital, a pan-African venture firm, with additional participation from DBL Partners, Amplo, Salesforce Ventures, and Africa-focused TLcom Capital.
Previous investors, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, and Spark Capital, also joined in funding what is now one of the most highly funded African company not based in Africa.
Andela says it will use the money to fund aggressive expansion plans — including the launch of two additional offices in other African countries.
But the financing comes as some local entrepreneurs have told us they worry about Andela taking money and attention away from other startups which are actually based on the ground in the continent.
The company was launched in 2014 to train African software developers and place them in jobs at some of the world’s top technology firms. The idea was to take an underutilized talent pool to help alleviate a global shortage of software developers. As the company notes, roughly 1.3 million software jobs went unfilled in the U.S. in 2016 alone.
Andela has built up campuses in Lagos, Nigeria, Nairobi, Kenya and Kampala, Uganda to train coders and then put them to work on projects for companies such as Mastercard Labs, Viacom, GitHub, and Gusto.
