Andela’s story is one of the more compelling pivots in tech. Founded in 2014 by Jeremy Johnson, Christina Sass, Ian Carnevale, and Brice Nkengsa, the company started as a coding academy in Lagos, Nigeria, training talented young Africans and placing them with global technology companies. The model was hailed as a way to unlock Africa’s tech talent.
The company initially operated training centers in Lagos, Nairobi, Kigali, and Kampala, selecting a tiny fraction of applicants for an intensive fellowship program. Andela raised over $380 million from investors including Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Spark Capital, and SoftBank, reaching a valuation of $1.5 billion by 2021.
In 2019, Andela made a dramatic shift, laying off hundreds of junior developers and pivoting from a training-focused model to a talent marketplace. The new Andela connects companies with experienced, pre-vetted developers on a contract basis, similar to Toptal or Turing but with roots in African talent.
Today, Andela’s talent network spans over 175 countries — well beyond its African origins. The platform evaluates developers on technical skills and matches them with clients for remote engagements. Companies like GitHub, Goldman Sachs, and Cloudflare have used Andela to find engineering talent.
The pivot raised questions about the company’s original social mission of building Africa’s tech ecosystem, but Andela argues that the marketplace model still benefits African developers by connecting them with global opportunities. The company has also expanded its offerings to include talent in data, cloud, and design, not just software development.
Andela’s journey reflects the broader challenges of building tech talent businesses: the training-first model was impactful but difficult to scale profitably, while the marketplace model is more commercially viable but less differentiated.
