Last December, we saw Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg along with his wife Priscilla Chan pledging 99 percent of their Facebook shares over their lifetimes to charity, celebrating the birth of their daughter Max. Their valuation stands strong at $48 billion, which is powering The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. On Thursday, the initiative made its first investment.
Andela announced that it is raising a Series B round led by The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It is a New York-based startup that deals with training software developers in Nigeria and getting them connected to potential careers. The company says that the current round is valued at $24 million. Zuck and Chan’s initiative had invested in a number of great companies but they hadn’t yet lead a round.
Andela was founded in 2014 has evolved a lot in the past two years. It currently constitutes of nearly 300 people spanning three continents who specialise in training developers in underdeveloped and developing countries like Nigeria. Not just this, after they are done with training, the firm guides these developers and gives them opportunities which would otherwise be impossible for them to achieve.
Currently, “Andela developers are building products for Google, Facebook and IBM, as well as many other fast-growing venture-backed startups. In their spare time, they’re driving the growth of local and global tech ecosystems: Building apps that trend on Github, forming organizations to empower the next generation of female developers, and speaking at tech events across the continent,” writes Jeremy Johnson, Andela’s CEO and co-founder.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Andel plans to reach the 100,000 developers milestone over the next 10 years. The latest fund, the company said, will be used to expand to more underprivileged countries in Africa.
I just went back to review the article that Christine Magee, then a reporter at TechCrunch and now our head of PR, wrote about us for the Series A, and the growth is very real. Total applicants have more than doubled from 15,000 to over 40,000, we’ve launched a second country, Kenya, as well as a second US office (San Francisco just last month!) and the global team has more than doubled.
Johnson writes.
