Andela, the world’s largest private marketplace for technical talent, is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a series of international events held from May 17 to May 25.
These events are taking place in key global locations including the US, UK, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda, Egypt, Brazil, and Pakistan, attracting over 550 key stakeholders. Participants include Andela’s six visionary founders, as well as former and current employees, talent, investors, clients, and industry players, highlighting a decade of the company’s significant influence on Africa’s tech landscape and its growing global impact.
Details
Founded in Lagos, Nigeria in 2014 by Jeremy Johnson, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Nadayar Enegesi, Brice Nkengsa, Ian Carnevale, and Christina Sass, Andela was built on the belief that ‘brilliance is equally distributed, but opportunity is not’. This guiding principle has propelled Andela to the forefront of matching exceptional technologists from traditionally overlooked regions like Africa and Latin America with companies seeking to bolster capacity and skill sets. After successfully trialling a remote-first model in Ghana and Egypt, Andela fully adopted this approach in 2020, transitioning into a global, remote-first talent marketplace that now spans over 135 countries.
By The Numbers
Over the past decade, the company has achieved remarkable milestones, including:
- Assembled one of the world’s largest tech communities with over 5 million members
- Andela has a 98% client satisfaction rate with their quality talent
- 110,000 technologists have been trained through Andela’s programs, exceeding the original 10-year goal of 100,000
- 15% of Africa’s estimated 716,000 engineers were skilled through Andela
- Andela’s talent marketplace in Africa spans 49 countries
- Andela’s talent pool in Africa has grown 179% a year on average for the past 10 years
- Since January 2020, technical talent from Nigeria has grown 791%, from Kenya has grown 451%, and from Ghana has grown 955%
Why This Matters
Backed by prominent investors such as Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Softbank, Google Ventures, Serena Ventures, and Generation Investment Management, Andela is the first talent marketplace to become a unicorn company and one of the seven unicorn companies founded in Africa. Andela is adeptly responding to the accelerating digital transformation and the insatiable demand for tech talent driven by generative AI.
Through its rigorously qualified global marketplace of skilled technologists, Andela’s adaptive hiring model has emerged as a future-proof solution, empowering businesses such as MasterCard, GitHub, and Tawi Fesh to rapidly scale world-class teams on demand to meet their evolving needs.
By tapping into 60% of Andela’s qualified tech talent pool from largely untapped markets like Africa and LATAM, these businesses gain access to cost-efficient tech expertise and diversity of thought, while also benefiting from hiring speeds up to 70% faster than traditional recruiting methods.
What They’re Saying
“Building a great company is fundamentally an exercise in hiring great people. At Andela, I have been unbelievably blessed to work with extraordinary humans on this now decade-long journey,” shares Jeremy Johnson, Co-Founder and CEO at Andela.
“Bringing people together and fostering a sense of community in our marketplace has been part of our secret sauce. As we look to the future, Andela will continue to show why we are the most trusted tech talent marketplace for enterprises. Our customers will continue to experience the world as a hiring pool, and technology will continue to enable us to extend that reach.”
“Celebrating our 10-year milestone with hundreds of industry players across the world, including former Andelans, is a testament to the strong community we have built and the leaders we have nurtured who are making significant impacts in the tech space across Africa and globally,” says Mike Ndimurukundo, Managing Director of Andela Rwanda.
“As pioneers in building a distributed workforce, our success is proof that opportunities can be effectively distributed, enabling technologists from Africa or anywhere in the world, to drive innovation. The journey doesn’t end here; together, we will continue to push boundaries and redefine the future of work”.
What Happens Next
As Andela enters its second decade, the company remains committed to advancing the borderless future of work now embraced by 58% of companies.
Moving forward, Andela plans to train more world-class technologists, further enhance its AI-powered platform, and drive transformative impact with partners across various sectors, including climate tech and healthcare.
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