Andela Brand Guidelines: A 2014 Lagos Fellowship Turned Remote Talent Marketplace

Four engineers from 700 applicants.

Andela began in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2014, TechCrunch reported in 2021. English Wikipedia names six co-founders: Jeremy Johnson, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Nadayar Enegesi, Brice Nkengsa, Ian Carnevale and Christina Sass. It says the company opened its first recruitment cycle in Lagos in May 2014 with a call for applications posted on Twitter, and took on a first cohort of four Nigerian software engineers from about 700 applicants.

The early model was a training programme rather than a marketplace. Engineers joined through the Andela Fellowship, a four-year programme aimed at junior developers, and were placed with client companies while they learned. The company’s own timeline says it launched an all-female cohort in Kenya in May 2016, opened in Kampala, Uganda, as its third African market in January 2017, and saw its first two cohorts complete the four-year programme in March 2018. English Wikipedia lists Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Python, React Native, Node and PHP among the languages applicants could train in.

Investors arrived in a series of rounds, each with a named lead. English Wikipedia lists Spark Capital as lead of the Series A in June 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for the Series B in 2016, the South African firm CRE Venture Capital for the Series C in October 2017, and Generation Investment Management for the Series D in 2019. In January 2017 Andela also partnered with Google on the Andela Learning Community, the company says, a programme of training and scholarships for technologists in Africa; English Wikipedia credits it with training around 110,000 people between 2014 and 2024, with partners including Microsoft and Pluralsight.

From accelerator to marketplace.

The model changed in 2019. English Wikipedia says Andela widened its hiring that year to mid-level and senior engineers in Lagos, Nairobi and Kampala, expanded remotely into Ghana and Egypt, and then went fully remote as a whole organisation in 2020; the company dates that switch to February 2020. TechCrunch reported in September 2021 that Andela had laid off staff in 2019, and described its move from a talent accelerator with African roots to a global technology network; the chief executive at the time called it “the journey of finding ourselves.”

The same TechCrunch report, published on 29 September 2021, covered a Series E round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with Whale Rock, Generation Investment Management, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Spark Capital also taking part. It said Andela, which had begun a global expansion earlier that year, then had engineers in more than 80 countries, up from seven African countries, and a client list of more than 200, according to the chief executive. The publication described the service in a sentence: Andela evaluated engineers’ technical and soft skills and matched them with the teams they fitted most closely. It added that most of the network still came from Africa and that the company was still growing in Nigeria.

The matching now runs through a platform. English Wikipedia describes a sequence of online assessments: technical tests through Qualified, a developer-assessment tool Andela owns, then soft-skills and leadership assessments, which together feed a “match fitness score” meant to estimate how likely a candidate is to succeed in a given role. Clients can take individual contractors to blend into their own teams, whole teams they manage themselves, or fully managed teams, it says. The skills on offer span application development, artificial intelligence, data engineering, cloud and DevOps.

Talent networks and their language.

Tech-talent networks and developer marketplaces sell access to people, so their identities lean on a few recurring ideas: the size of a pool, the reach of a map and the rigour of a test. Andela says its network speaks more than 300 languages and that more than 650 organisations have built with it; Turing’s website counts more than 5 million domain experts. Such figures are the companies’ own, and they move quickly: in December 2021 Turing told TechCrunch it had 1 million engineers and developers, and in March 2025 it said it worked with some 4 million coders.

Vetting usually gets a name of its own. Turing called its platform the “Talent Cloud,” and Andela later launched the Andela Talent Cloud. English Wikipedia describes Andela’s technical, soft-skills and leadership assessments feeding a “match fitness score,” and Andela has bought assessment and practice tools such as Qualified and Codewars, which it presents as a source of behavioural data from millions of developers.

The matching itself tends to be described as a sequence. TechCrunch wrote in 2021 that Turing used AI to source, evaluate, hire, onboard and then manage engineers remotely, and in the same year described Andela as evaluating technical and soft skills before matching engineers with the teams they fitted most closely.

Corporate pages put founders, investors and milestones up front. Andela’s about page runs a dated timeline of funding rounds, cohorts and acquisitions, illustrated with photographs of its own events, and introduces its leadership team; Turing’s company page lists its two co-founders by title. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, separating dated reporting from what the company says about itself.

A brand identity unveiled in 2022.

Acquisitions followed in 2023. The company says it bought Casana, Codewars and Qualified.io that year and launched the Andela Talent Cloud platform. English Wikipedia dates the Qualified purchase to March 2023 and that of Casana, a Munich-based network of IT talent, to May 2023, and says Andela added Woven, a technical-assessment company, in January 2026. English Wikipedia puts the talent pool at more than 150,000 people across some 135 countries, about 60 per cent of them in Africa and Latin America.

Leadership changed in 2024, when Carrol Chang, previously head of driver and courier operations at Uber, became chief executive; English Wikipedia gives August 2024 and the company September 2024. Andela’s current website calls the company the “human layer for enterprise AI,” says more than 650 organisations have built with it, and names NVIDIA, Google and GitHub as partners in its training programmes. It says its network speaks more than 300 languages, and presents Codewars as a source of behavioural data from millions of developers.

The identity has moved with the business. The company says it unveiled a new brand identity in July 2022, two years after going remote. Its about page leads with the line “We Connect Brilliance with Opportunity,” runs a dated timeline of rounds, cohorts and acquisitions, and illustrates it with photographs of its own milestones, among them a Times Square billboard marking the company’s tenth anniversary in 2024. Its newsroom offers the press a brand book with colours, typography and core assets, alongside logo files and usage rules.

For a design guide, Andela shows how a brand built on a training programme can carry its name into a marketplace without changing it. Compare Toptal, another network of remote technical talent, and Turing, which also began by vetting remote engineers. For this guide we use a deep ink, a fired clay and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Andela’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.