Andela, a firm which uses African computer programmers to work remotely for US corporations, has secured $100m (£77m) in investment.
This deal is the third-largest venture investment ever for an African startup, Bloomberg quotes market researchers CB Insights as saying.
The funding comes from Generation Investment Management – a firm run by the former US Vice-President Al Gore.
The technology company says it intends to use part of the funding to improve its software to spot talented programmers and monitor the performance of their workers.
“It’s increasingly clear that the future of work will be distributed, in part due to the severe shortage of engineering talent,” says Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Andela said in a statement.
“Given our access to incredible talent across Africa, as well as what we’ve learned from scaling hundreds of engineering teams around the world, Andela is able to provide the talent and the technology to power high-performing teams and help companies adopt the distributed model faster.”
Andela employs 1,100 developers based in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.
