TheCable

Andela, an African company that develops talents in software engineers, says it will hire a total of 1000 software developers in 2019.

The company made this known in a statement sent to TheCable, announcing that it has completed its $100 million Series D funding.

According to the statement, the funding round was led by Generation Investment Management with participation from existing investors including Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, Spark Capital, and CRE Venture Capital.

The most recent financing brings Andela’s total venture funding to $180M.

The company says it will use the funding to accelerate the development of its technology platform to identify, develop and match talent and also expand its presence across Africa to meet global demand for engineering talent.

“It’s increasingly clear that the future of work will be distributed, in part due to the severe shortage of engineering talent,” says Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Andela.

“Given our access to incredible talent across Africa, as well as what we’ve learned from scaling hundreds of engineering teams around the world, Andela is able to provide the talent and the technology to power high-performing teams and help companies adopt the distributed model faster.”

In her remarks, Lilly Wollman, co-head of growth equity at Generation Investment Management, shared her belief that Andela has the model to software engineers and deploy them into future enterprise.

“Generation’s investment in Andela resulted from our deep research into the future of work. We believe Andela is a transformational model to develop software engineers and deploy them at scale into the future enterprise,” she said.

“The global demand for software engineers far exceeds supply, and that gap is projected to widen. Andela’s leading technology enables firms to effectively build and manage distributed engineering teams.

“We are great admirers of the outstanding team, mission and culture Andela has built across two continents and five countries.”

The company, which was founded in 2014, trains developers who products for Google, Facebook and IBM.