Why African Edtech Firm Andela Acquired Skills Assessment Platform Qualified

In order to find, qualify, and certify elite engineers, Andela, a worldwide network for remote technical talent, has acquired Qualified, the premier technical skills testing platform. With the acquisition of more than 3.6M engineering users from Codewars, a Qualified-powered online community that allows technical talent to compete and hone their practical coding abilities in gamified challenges, Andela’s worldwide talent network will also grow.

Jeremy Johnson, founder and CEO of Andela
Jeremy Johnson, founder and CEO of Andela

“With the Qualified acquisition, Andela expands and accelerates our ability to source and expertly assess talent,” said Jeremy Johnson, founder and CEO of Andela. “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.”

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A global talent network, Andela links businesses with approved distant technical talent in developing economies. With a 96% match success rate, the Andela platform aids businesses in scaling their engineering teams up to 70% quicker than internal recruiting. Andela is trusted by hundreds of top companies, like GitHub, Cloudflare, and ViacomCBS, to help them rapidly and affordably create better teams. Andela is supported by investors such as Generation Investment Management, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Spark Capital, and Google Ventures and has a talent network in more than 170 nations.

The best platform in the world for evaluating software developers is called qualified.io. Leading businesses like Klarna, Facebook, and Zoom benefit from the advantages of talent assessment and training at scale thanks to the developer-focused platform of Qualified.io. Qualified.io was developed by the same team that created the developer community Codewars, and it has the support of financiers including Cornerstone OnDemand, Social Capital, and Dalus Capital. Qualified.io received transactional advice from Mark Miller, Managing Partner, GHP Advisors.

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert. 
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard