Andela Is Shutting Down All Its Offices Across Africa and US

Is This The End?

A chat trail on Techpoint’s Community with the heading ” A death of a Unicorn?” caught my attention yesterday. The writer mentioned that he got an insider information that Andela was selling off its physical assets and was wondering if that marked the end of the company.

Andela has been an African Tech Superstar having been valued at about $700million and poised to become a Unicorn in the nearest future according to Forbes.

 So, how can a company with such potential die?

Andela launched about six years ago with a seemingly perfect and simple talent outsourcing business model. There was a stream of talent that could be sharpened on one end and companies that needed the talents on the other end. Andela set out to train African software engineers that could compete anywhere in the world. Fellowship places at Andela’s campuses were highly sought after, with fewer than 1% of hopefuls making it through the rigorous application process.

It was a well thought out hybrid of EdTech and HR-Tech.

The company attracted a lot of attention and received a $24million investment from the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative, a move that may have inspired trust in other investors. The company set a target to train 100,000 developers and had campuses in four African countries.

All was well until the company announced that it was letting 420 junior developers in its Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda offices go. Andela cited the need to restructure its talent pool to more closely align with global market demand as the reason for the mass workforce reduction. It was a bit puzzling especially because the news came on the back of a successful $100million Series D funding.

Again, another 135 workers were let go in February. According to Jeremy Johnson, Andela’s CEO, the layoff was due to impact of the COVID-19 on the company’s customers and the accompanying economic downturn. Based on this, the company was implementing cost-cutting measures to ensure the company could cope with the decline in business from existing customers and new customers.

The news of retrenchment doesn’t help the rumours but it doesn’t make them credible too.

What Now?

Speaking anonymously, a source close to Andela confirmed to us that , Andela is indeed selling off its physical assets in all of its offices across Africa and in the US. However , contrary to some of the rumours making rounds, this move is more in line with  Andela  going fully remote . Jeremy Johnson shared this in a medium post.

When we started Andela, we were focused on solving the problem that “brilliance is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not.” We organized the entire company around unlocking potential and enabling prospective software engineers to develop the most in demand skills.

Today, the world needs something very different. While we’ve made great strides in unlocking brilliance and developing talent across Africa, there are still countless barriers that prevent talent, regardless of experience level, from connecting with great opportunities. Over time, we’ve shifted our focus to breaking down those barriers. This shift, driven by where the world is going, has been underway for some time, but we must accelerate it given where the world is now.

While the difference between unlocking brilliance and enabling talent seems semantic, it actually has far-reaching cultural and operational implications. One of the most important examples of this is how we think about physical space.

 Jeremy mentioned that the company is open to connecting talents that have not passed through the Andela to companies that may need them. Also, going remote opens the company to a larger pool of talent resources whom are not constrained by physical location.

Nzekwe Henry of WeeTracker opined that this new positioning places the company more as an HR Tech company. I can’t agree more.

We are keeping our fingers crossed and rooting for Andela as it goes through these changes.