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Jeremy Johnson, Co-founder and CEO, Andela has been named among the 32 top tech people to watch in New York, where he and his co-founders started the knowledge sharing startup.
With students in Nigeria and Kenya, Andela finds and trains African software developers and places them with multinational corporations as full-time, distributed team members to earn experience and be paid for their time, thereby solving the both skills and the unemployment problem at once.
Recently, Andela partnered with Codementor, a marketplace for on-demand one-to-one programming help and long-term mentorship from expert software developers as well as IBM’s Big Data University to spread big data literacy to Africa.
In June last year, Andela raised $10m from Series A funding round led by Spark Capital to help meet the growing demand for Andela’s world-class remote software developers in the United States and Europe. The new funding is being used to help Andela maintain its growth in Nigeria and Kenya, while expanding across Africa.
Launched in Lagos, Nigeria in 2014, Andela finds Africa’s best and brightest, trains them to become software developers and connects them with companies remotely around the world. Spanning multiple industries and continents, Andela’s clients range from Fortune 100 companies including Microsoft, to fast-growing technology breakouts like Udacity. With more than 15,000 applications, Andela’s acceptance rate is below 1%.
Prior to Andela, Jeremy co-founded 2U which delivers online degree programs from the world’s best universities. Apart from this recognition by Built in NYC, Jeremy Johnson has also been named as the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 innovator in 2013 and 2014 consecutively.