The Uganda opening adds to offices in Nairobi, Lagos, New York, and San Francisco. It also marks year three of Andela’s rise as a VC backed, revenue focused firm that is often misread as a charity.
Chief executive Jeremy Johnson described the organization as “a mission driven for-profit company”―a model for the concept “that you can actually build businesses that create real impact.”
Andela connects the opportunity to train and employ developers from frontier African markets to a projected future gap between computer science jobs and qualified graduates to fill them.
The company touts it selection process as “extreme recruiting”, adding that it takes “1 percent of tech talent from the largest pool of untapped talent in the world” for its 6 month training program. In its first Uganda recruitment cycle the accelerator accepted 8 of 800 applicants.
“We are bringing in a class every single month, and a new cohort is…rolling on to partner companies every month.” Andela places programmers at over 80 companies in 25 cities around the world, according to Johnson.
Andela raised $39 million in venture funding from investors including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Spark Capital, and GV. Andela currently earns revenues from corporate partners who pay to utilize developers. “Those companies think of it a bit like AWS for talent,” he said, referring to Amazon Web Services.
