Andela押注非洲程序员：1亿美元D轮、裁员，然后软银支持的15亿美元转型

做的是什么生意

Talent network that finds, trains and manages software developers in Africa (later globally) and places them as remote engineers with enterprise customers.

启动资金：$381M raised by 2021, including a $100M Series D (2019) and a $200M Series E led by SoftBank (2021).

起因

Founded in Lagos in 2014 by Jeremy Johnson, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Christina Sass and others. Customers paid $50,000–$120,000 per developer; the developer kept roughly a third, and the rest funded six-month bootcamps, campuses in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, and team management. By January 2019 Andela had more than 200 customers and about 1,100 trained developers, and raised a $100M Series D from Generation Investment Management at a $600–700M valuation.

经过

Growth exposed the cost structure: physical campuses and long training pipelines were expensive, and the fee split left little margin. In May 2020 Andela cut 135 jobs, with senior staff taking 10–30% pay cuts, then in July 2020 announced it was closing its campuses entirely, going fully remote, and widening its reach to a potential pool of more than 500,000 engineers across the whole continent.

结果

In September 2021 SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $200M Series E at a $1.5B valuation, making Andela a unicorn. By then it had engineers in more than 80 countries, a client list of over 200 including GitHub, Cloudflare and ViacomCBS, and total funding of $381M.

可借鉴之处

作为服务的人才培训难以规模化：校园和漫长的管道使安置成本高昂。资产是网络，而不是训练营；投资者仅在市场转型后才支付15亿美元。