Born in Lagos, hiring the world. The global talent marketplace connecting companies with 150,000+ vetted technologists across 135+ countries.
Profile
Andela is the world’s largest private marketplace for technical talent — and one of African tech’s defining success stories. Founded in Lagos in 2014 by Jeremy Johnson, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Nadayar Enegesi, Brice Nkengsa, Ian Carnevale and Christina Sass, Andela began with a bold proposition: brilliance is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not — and Africa’s technologists deserved a seat at the global table. Its first act trained junior developers in Nigeria and Kenya through an intensive fellowship, expanding to Uganda and Egypt, before pivoting in 2019 to a marketplace for mid- and senior-level engineers and going fully remote in 2020. Around 60% of its talent base remains in Africa and Latin America.
Today Andela operates an AI-driven marketplace matching more than 150,000 pre-qualified technologists from 135+ countries with Fortune 500 corporations and high-growth scale-ups — clients have included GitHub, Goldman Sachs and Mastercard. Its Andela Talent Cloud is an integrated, AI-powered platform to source, qualify, hire, manage and pay global technical talent, with matching algorithms that pinpoint the best technologists up to 70% faster at 30–50% less cost than traditional hiring; acquisitions include Qualified (coding assessments), Casana (European IT talent) and Woven (AI assessments), and in 2026 Andela launched its AI Academy. The company reached unicorn status in 2021 with a $200 million Series E led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 — total funding of $381 million from investors including Generation Investment Management, Spark Capital, CRE Venture Capital, Serena Ventures and Omidyar Network — at a $1.5 billion valuation. Former Uber executive Carrol Chang became CEO in 2024, with the company now New York-anchored and fully distributed.
Services
- Global tech talent marketplace: hire vetted individual engineers or fully managed teams, up to 66% faster at 30–50% lower cost
- Andela Talent Cloud: AI-driven end-to-end platform for sourcing, qualifying, hiring, managing and paying global talent, with the Talent Decision Engine for matching
- Skills coverage: application development, AI/ML, cloud & DevOps, data engineering, product management and design
- AI-native engineering: production-ready AI systems including data pipelines, enterprise retrieval, agentic workflows and deployment infrastructure
- Borderless hiring operations: compliance, payroll, onboarding and talent management handled end-to-end
- Skills assessment (Qualified by Andela) and talent development (AI Academy)
Leadership team
Carrol Chang
CEO
Carrol Chang was appointed CEO of Andela in September 2024 and is committed to scaling the business while remaining true to its mission-driven approach of connecting brilliance with opportunity. She joined us from Uber, where she led efforts to improve work for nearly 7 million flexible workers around the world as the Global Head of Driver & Courier Operations.
She has held positions with McKinsey Company, Portraits of Hope, and the administration of President Barack Obama. She is passionate about expanding opportunity in all forms to underrepresented populations and making commerce more generous and kind for all stakeholders. She holds a BA from Harvard and both a JD and MBA from Northwestern University.
Carrol resides in Washington, D.C., with her husband and three young children. In her spare time, she has a creative passion for crafting mouth-watering charcuterie boards and epic Halloween costumes for her family.
Location
New York