Andela, Inc.

What does Andela, Inc. own?

Andela owns a single brand, the Andela talent marketplace, plus the assessment technology behind it. It has no separate subsidiary brands; all services are sold under the Andela name.

Is Andela publicly traded?

No. Andela is privately held. Its shares are owned by founders, employees, and venture investors and do not trade on any exchange.

Who founded Andela?

The company was founded in 2014 by Jeremy Johnson, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Nadayar Enegesi, Brice Nkengsa, Ian Carnevale, and Christina Sass.

Where is Andela headquartered?

Andela is headquartered in New York, New York, USA. Its workforce and talent network are distributed across more than 100 countries, with the largest share in Sub-Saharan Africa.

How many brands does Andela own?

One. Andela operates a single masterbrand and does not maintain a multi-brand portfolio.

Who owns Andela?

Ownership is split among founders, employees, and venture capital investors. Major backers include SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Generation Investment Management, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Spark Capital, and Google Ventures. The last disclosed valuation was $1.5 billion in September 2021.

Has Andela raised major funding recently?

Its largest round was the $200 million Series E in September 2021. No major equity round has been publicly announced since; reported deals through 2025 and 2026 were smaller later-stage and debt transactions.

Andela was founded in May 2014 by six co-founders: Jeremy Johnson, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Nadayar Enegesi, Brice Nkengsa, Ian Carnevale, and Christina Sass. Johnson, an American education entrepreneur, and Aboyeji, a Nigerian entrepreneur who later co-founded Flutterwave, were the most visible early leaders. The founding premise was that brilliance is evenly distributed while opportunity is not, and that remote work could connect African developers to global employers.

The original model was a fellowship. Applicants competed for places at residential campuses in Lagos and Nairobi, received months of software development training, and were then placed on remote teams at paying client companies. Andela earned revenue from the placements, effectively a staffing markup wrapped around free training.

Funding scaled quickly. A $10 million Series A came in 2015, a $24 million Series B led by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2016, a $40 million Series C in 2017, and a $100 million Series D in January 2019. By 2019 the company operated in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda and had placed more than a thousand developers.

The 2020 pivot was the defining structural change. Andela closed its campuses, ended the residential fellowship, and reopened as a fully remote marketplace accepting experienced engineers worldwide. The tradeoff was deliberate: it gave up the junior training mission's intimacy for a vastly larger supply pool and a cleaner match to client demand for senior talent.

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $200 million Series E in September 2021 at a $1.5 billion valuation, with Whale Rock Capital and prior investors participating. Co-founder Jeremy Johnson later stepped down as CEO, and Carrol Chang took the role.

Since 2022 the company has cut direct headcount in several rounds while repositioning toward AI related work: supplying engineers who train, evaluate, and fine-tune models, and deploying what it calls AI native engineering teams. Workforce data through 2026 shows direct employees down roughly 28 percent from 2023 levels, near 1,000 to 1,300, even as revenue per worker likely rose.

Andela has faced limited public scrutiny for a company of its visibility. The main documented issues are internal and structural rather than legal.

In 2019 and 2020 the company's fellowship model drew criticism over very low acceptance rates and the gap between what clients paid and what African fellows earned, a debate about labor arbitrage that applies to the entire remote staffing category. Andela responded that fellows received competitive local compensation plus training with real market value.

Between 2020 and 2025 the company ran multiple layoffs tied to the fellowship shutdown, the remote pivot, and later restructuring. These eliminated several hundred roles across four African countries and reduced direct headcount by roughly a quarter from its 2023 peak. No regulatory actions, fines, or product liability issues are on record.