Andela, the engineering outsourcing company that trains African developers to work remotely for American corporations, has received $100 million in a funding round led by former U.S Vice President Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management.
Andela builds engineering teams of software developers throughout Africa. So far, the company has 1,000 workers in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Nigeria, and they work with more than 200 companies.
“As the war for talent continues, there’s one macro trend that is both enabling Andela’s growth and powering many of the companies that have found a competitive edge: distributed work,” Andela CEO and Co-Founder Jeremy Johnson said in a blog post announcing the funding round.
Bloomberg’s Joshua Brustein points out that one thing that makes Andela so attractive to firms like Generation is that there’s an argument that remote work can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and sustainability is a major mission of Gore’s firm.
Other Andela investors include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Spark Capital and Learn Capital.
The company matches developers with customers’ needs and its employees are flown out to clients’ headquarters for two weeks to learn more about the companies they’ll be working with.
Andela is tapping in to an area of worry for some American workers. In a 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center, 30 percent of respondents said that increased outsourcing of jobs has hurt their job or career.
Andela plans to use the funding to expand its infrastructure.
