Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, the Nigerian entrepreneur who co-founded Andela and Flutterwave, has launched Talent Nation, a startup that plans to train and place 1 million African artificial intelligence engineers with companies around the world over the next decade, Semafor reported on Wednesday.
The company has raised a pre-seed round co-led by Enza Capital and London-based LocalGlobe, with Future Africa, Kaleo Ventures, Ajim Capital, Solving.org and Accelerate Africa also taking part. It did not disclose how much it raised.
Aboyeji, 35, is Talent Nation’s executive chairman. Kesiah Valkin, a South African-born entrepreneur who co-founded the London coding school 01 Founders, is chief executive.
“Talent is the final constraint to super intelligence,” Aboyeji said. He said the company wants to make certified AI engineers available to businesses at a fraction of what they would pay frontier AI labs or consulting firms.
No upfront fees
Talent Nation is built on Learn2Earn, a training academy Aboyeji founded that has been running for about 18 months. In that time it has received more than 63,000 applications, assessed more than 32,000 candidates and admitted about 1,400 fellows, accepting fewer than 3% of applicants. It runs nine campuses in six cities.
Applicants take an online test followed by in-person trials. The strongest are placed with clients straight away, while others go through programs of three, six or 12 months that mix projects, internships and work experience. Trainees pay nothing upfront. Companies pay for the engineers they take on, that revenue funds new trainees, and engineers in work contribute to the cost of training later groups. IHS Towers, the telecom tower company, is among its clients.
The company’s slogan is “AI for the rest of us,” a pitch aimed at businesses outside the big technology groups that want to build their own AI tools but cannot compete for engineers in San Francisco or London.
“Technological breakthroughs alone will not deliver widespread adoption,” Valkin said.
Sir John Lazar, a general partner at Enza Capital and president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said his firm backed the founders’ record in finding engineering talent and placing African professionals in well-paid work.
A familiar model
The plan echoes Aboyeji’s first company. He co-founded Andela in 2014 to train African software developers and place them with technology companies abroad, and it went on to raise money from investors including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google Ventures and SoftBank and reach a valuation of more than $1 billion. In 2016 he co-founded Flutterwave, the payments company that became one of Africa’s most valuable startups. He also helped build Moove, a vehicle financing company for ride-hailing drivers.
Aboyeji, who was born in 1991, now runs the venture firm Future Africa, which is one of Talent Nation’s backers. He also sits on the advisory committee of the Nigerian government’s 3 Million Technical Talent program, and in February Learn2Earn announced a partnership with the Digital Bridge Institute to train 1 million AI engineers in support of that program.
The company has not set out a year-by-year timetable for reaching its 1 million target, which works out to about 100,000 engineers a year.