Africa's Startup Innovation Highlight, Andela 2.0, Steps into Scale-up Stasis
In the world of African tech, Andela has been a beacon of innovation and resilience. Over the past year, the company has faced challenges and changes that have shaped its future, as noted by Delle, the investor and author of Making Futures.
Andela, once a standard bearer of Africa's attractiveness and readiness for tech investment, raised $100 million in a Series D round between Series B and January 2019. This significant investment marked a milestone in the company's growth.
The Andela Learning Community, a non-profit initiative in partnership with Pluralsight and Google, recently onboarded its 2020 class of Google Africa Developer scholars. This initiative is a testament to Andela's commitment to nurturing talent and providing opportunities for African engineers.
One of the factors that sets Andela apart from job matching platforms is its average engagement, which lasts over 18 months. With a remote model, Andela estimates it can source from a pool of 500,000 engineers across Africa.
However, the prospect of working at Andela as a "specialized" software engineer may have lost some of its original innovative pulse. In a move to adapt to the changing landscape, Andela has separated its operations into a software engineering network and the Andela Learning Community.
The original mission of Andela was to plug distributed African brilliance to global opportunities. Last week's announcement revealed that Andela is open to hiring more developers from more African countries, reaffirming this commitment.
In a shift from its earlier focus, Andela has evolved from a talent source to a full cycle talent partner. The company's new policy is to pay new hires on a per contract basis, administered by Courtney Machi, their new Vice President for Product.
Andela was a profoundly African game-changer in education and technology in the early 2010s, more selective than Harvard. The main campus, located in Lagos, employed about 600+ Nigerian staff until it went fully remote in May. This shift has expanded access to software engineering opportunities.
The software engineering market, especially in the junior category, has reached a ceiling. This relative shrinkage in entry-level opportunities, evidenced by the last 10 months of mass evictions, has coincided with Andela's evolution.
Johnson's 2015 estimate of 1.8 million jobs in North America available to Andela to fill might have been an oversell. Despite this, ex-Andelans are co-founding and co-funding new African startups, including a potential Andela replacement in the talent accelerator genre.
Amidst these changes, Andela continues to make strides in the tech industry. The company's resilience and adaptability are a testament to its enduring impact on the African tech landscape.
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