Andela, a US-based IT recruitment company focused on Africa-based developers, raised $40m in series C funding on Tuesday from investors including Salesforce Ventures,a subsidiary of enterprise software producer Salesforce.
The round was led by venture capital firm CRE Venture Capital and included GV, the early-stage corporate venturing arm of internet technology conglomerate Alphabet, as well as DBL Partners, Amplo, TLcom Capital, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Spark Capital.
Founded in 2014, Andela identifies highly talented developers across Africa and gives them access to a six-month training scheme before connecting them to firms in the US looking for engineering teams.
Andela has hired 500 developers to date out of a pool of more than 70,000 applications. The company is currently active in Uganda and the cities of Lagos, Nigeria, and Nairobi, Kenya.
The funding will drive Andela’s expansion efforts, including the opening of offices in two additional countries over the next year as the company seeks to double the number of developers hired through the platform to 1,000.
The company has now raised just over $80m in total, it said in a statement. It secured $24m in a June 2016 series B round led by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and backed by GV, CRE, Spark Capital, Omidyar Network, and Learn Capital.
Omidyar and Learn Capital had previously contributed to Andela’s $14.7m series A round in 2015, after taking part in a seed round of undisclosed size in 2014 alongside Spark and CRE.
Pule Taukobong, founding partner at CRE, will join Andela’s board of directors along with Julia Gillard, the former prime minister of Australia, and Omobola Johnson, senior partner at TLcom and former minister of communication technology for Nigeria.