Andela acquires Qualified, expanding its talent network

Global job placement network, Andela, announced that it has acquired Qualified, a leading technical skills assessment platform to identify, qualify, and certify top engineers. This acquisition expands Andela’s global talent community with the addition of more than 3.6 million engineering users via Codewars, an online community powered by Qualified that enables technical talent to compete and improve their practical coding skills in gamified challenges.

The terms and amount involved in the acquisition were not disclosed.

Founded by Nathan Doctor, co-founder and CEO and Jake Hoffner, Co-Founder & CTO in 2016, Qualified is a cloud-based technical skills assessment platform that provides coding assignments to enterprises to hire tech talent.

Users can choose or create assessments, which are then taken by the developer and then receive a summarized result of the candidate performance. Some of the potential clients are Facebook, Zoom, Domino’s, Apple, etc. Qualified is backed by investors such as Cornerstone OnDemand, Social Capital, and Dalus Capital.

Launched in Africa in 2014, Andela is the brainchild of Jeremy Johnson, Nigerian entrepreneur Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, American education advocate Christina Sass, and Canadian startup founder Ian Carnevale. Andela specializes in helping companies build remote engineering hubs by providing them with access to the best software engineers in the world.

Valued at over $1.5 billion, Andela has raised over $381 million since inception with the most recent raise being $200 million in a Series E funding round in 2021.

Jeremy Johnson, founder and CEO of Andela believes the acquisition of Qualified expands and accelerates Andela’s ability to source and expertly assess talent.

According to him, “Labor marketplaces are constrained by inefficiencies between supply, demand and quality —Qualified allows us to address those inefficiencies by providing the certified right talent at the right time. Companies will continue to trust that talent sourced through Andela has the needed skills regardless of where they live and work.”

Jake Hoffner, the Co-founder and CEO of Qualified, added, “The tech industry has historically relied on hiring practices that have proven to be ineffective. The expanded platform will allow companies to create hiring processes for software engineers that are predictive of their on-the-job performance. In addition, we provide companies and our growing tech community a bigger, broader, and better opportunity to connect globally.”