Andela has acquired a 100% stake in Qualified, an assessment platform that certifies top engineering talents. The deal, which was finalised at an undisclosed sum, will add about 3.6 million engineering talents to Andela’s global community. These talents were previously users of Codewars, an online community run by Qualified that enables technical talents to compete among themselves and develop practical coding skills through gamified challenges.
In a statement shared with TechCabal, Andela’s CEO and co-founder, Jeremy Johnson, expressed excitement about Andela’s growing ability to find and qualify talents.“With the Qualified acquisition, Andela expands and accelerates our ability to source and expertly assess talent,” he said.
“Labour 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,” Johnson added
This will be Andela’s first publicly announced acquisition, and it comes on the back of the company’s renewed focus on senior developers. Backed by over $381 million in VC funding, Andela has grown to support vibrant technical talent communities in over 170 countries globally. Notably, the company has a focus on emerging markets—like Nigeria, where it first began operations in 2014.
Speaking to the possibilities that the deal brings, CEO and co-founder of Qualified, Jake Hoffner, maintained that the expanded Andela product will allow companies to hire software engineers through processes that will reveal what their on-the-job performance would be.
“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,” he said
Qualified brands itself as the world’s most effective platform for assessing software engineers, and has a clientele list that includes Facebook, Zoom, and Klarna.
