Software talent company Andela could be closing all of its offices to go completely remote in Africa. The news comes barely a month after laying off 135 employees due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Close sources have revealed that the software development firm has already sold off its equipment to a few employees and is now selling to asset disposal companies. Before the team went all remote, Andela had employees across offices in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, and the United States.
Earlier on Andela had cited that the closure was pegged on the fact that many of its customers have been impacted by the economic downturn resulting from the pandemic.
In May, the Andela CEO Jeremy Johnson in a blog said, “Last week, we announced at an all-hands that we are going to be a remote-first company. While we’ve always been a leader in distributed work, we’ve now proven that we can operate fully remote by delivering excellent work to our customers over the past couple of months. We will continue to ensure that our engineers have the infrastructure needed to operate at a world-class level”.
The company will maintain one office in the world that will act as a sales office. While the rest of the operations remain fully remote in all locations including the US.
“As we have now moved to a fully remote model, we have moved out of our physical leased offices in all locations and all Engineers and Enterprise Staff are working from home.”
“Of course, as a result of this, we have to move out our assets – some of which have been sold off to employees and others to third-party companies, who have shown interest in the items we no longer need,” Andela said.
In 2019, Andela launched the first-ever remote centre in Egypt in partnership with the ICT ministry which has been in operation since then including investing in at least 200 of the top software engineers in Egypt.