How Six People Built Andela into Africa's Biggest Tech Talent Story

“The best engineers in the world don't all live in Silicon Valley. Some of them grew up in Lagos, Nairobi and Kigali, and all they needed was a door…”

Africa has never had a shortage of brilliant minds. What it has always struggled with is giving those minds somewhere to go. For decades, talented young Africans with a knack for technology had two options: leave the continent for opportunities abroad, or stay and watch their skills go to waste. 

What started as four job slots, 700 applicants, and one bold idea in Lagos has grown into a $1.5 billion global marketplace connecting African developers to the world, and the six people behind it changed the conversation permanently.

Where It All Began

Andela was founded in May 2014 in Lagos, Nigeria, by six co-founders who each brought something different to the table. 

Jeremy Johnson, an American entrepreneur who had previously co-founded 2U, an online education company, brought insightful experience in edtech (education technology - businesses that use tech to improve learning). 

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, a young Nigerian entrepreneur already known in Lagos startup circles, brought African market knowledge and credibility on the ground.

Christina Sass brought operational leadership. 

Ian Carnevale brought product and engineering expertise.

Brice Nkengsa and Nadayar Enegesi, both African tech professionals, brought firsthand understanding of what talented African developers needed and faced.

Together, they built around one core idea: genius is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. Africa was producing brilliant software developers; the world just didn't know where to find them.

Making Moves

Their first move was bold and simple. They posted a call for applications on Twitter for four training fellowship slots in Lagos. Over 700 people applied. That number, “700 applicants for just 4 spots,” told them everything they needed to know. 

The demand was real and the talent was real. The gap between African developers and global opportunity was very real. They filled the four spots, trained those engineers intensively, and placed them with international companies, and it worked. The model was proven before they had even raised serious money.

By 2015, Andela raised $10 million in Series A funding, an early-stage investment round for companies that proved their idea works, led by Spark Capital. The following year, things went to a completely different level.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the foundation set up by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, led Andela's $24 million Series B round, making it their very first lead investment ever. 

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, also visited Andela's Lagos campus. Suddenly, Andela wasn't just an African startup; it was a global story.

By 2018, Andela had opened campuses in Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala, and Kigali, and celebrated its first engineers completing the full four-year training programme. 

Between 2014 and 2024, Andela trained over 110,000 technologists across Africa, representing 15% of the entire continent's base of software engineers.

What changed along the way?

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to work remotely, and Andela was already built for exactly that. The company shut down its physical campuses and shifted to a fully remote, global model. 

Instead of just placing African engineers with companies, Andela evolved into a full talent marketplace, a platform where companies anywhere in the world could find, hire, and work with skilled tech professionals from over 135 countries. It was no longer just an African talent story. It was a global one with African roots.

In 2021, Andela raised $200 million in a Series E round, a late-stage funding round for well-established companies, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion and making it one of Africa's few unicorns (a startup valued at over $1 billion). Total funding raised to date stands at $381 million.

Where does Andela stand today?

Today, Andela serves hundreds of leading global companies, including GitHub, Cloudflare, ViacomCBS, and Coursera, helping them build and scale engineering teams quickly and cost-effectively. 

Its acceptance rate at inception was less than 1%, keeping quality exceptionally high. It has since acquired Woven Teams and Casana to strengthen its platform further.

One of the original co-founders, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji went on to co-found Flutterwave, Africa's most valuable payments startup, and later launched Future Africa, a venture platform now valued at over $6 billion. 

Jeremy Johnson remains CEO of Andela to this day.

Andela didn't just build a company. It built a system that takes raw African talent and connects it directly to the world's biggest technology companies. 

In doing so, it proved something that needed proving: that the best engineers in the world don't all live in Silicon Valley. 

Some of them grew up in Lagos, Nairobi, and Kigali, and all they needed was a chance to show they belonged.