Propel, a Lagos and Berlin-based startup has raised €2.5 million ($2.74 million) in seed funding.
No Such Ventures led the round, with participation from APX (an accelerator run by Axel Springer Digital Ventures and Porsche Digital), Golden Egg Check, and the Future of Learning Fund.
Sunkanmi Ola, Seun Owolabi, and Abel Agoi formed the firm in 2020 and hope to use the financing to accelerate the roll-out and adoption of its community-as-a-service platform and produce €1 million in revenue for communities by Q4 of next year.
Over the last three years, a prevalent theme has been that the epidemic has expanded global remote work and multinational organizations’ hiring of local personnel, mostly to cut hiring expenses.
And, regardless of a significant reset since mid-2022 that has witnessed tech companies lay off over 200,000 employees and employers push for partial to full return-to-office requests, the importance of an open talent economy will remain, particularly in Europe, where the population is aging, leaving a gap that realistically requires remote talent outside the region.
Africa has the world’s youngest population, and its digital talent pool will only grow, thanks to the expansion of online learning, STEM courses, and, most crucially, communities, which play an essential part in placement and are an area of concentration for Propel.
After a year of placing local tech talent in retail and automotive companies such as Porsche and Mercedes, Propel noticed that these talents were connected to a community such as developer groups, talent incubators, and training schools, which slightly shifted the startup’s decision to concentrate (the startup claims that 8 out of 10 people in emerging markets belong to a community). As a result, its strategy is oriented toward the community.
“We realized communities are the building blocks of any tech ecosystem, particularly emerging market ecosystems, but nobody has been building for communities and the distribution layer for the tech talent pipeline had been missing,” said Ola, Propel’s CEO.
“Most tech communities build their talent pool and upskill, but the last mile where you convert these talents to jobs is missing, and communities struggle in that regard.”
Propel connects these digital communities’ talent with a network of enterprises driven by diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) objectives and particular employment needs requiring filling.
In exchange for supplying last-mile infrastructure, Propel taps into these tech communities’ various pools of expertise, which range from software development to design, data science to no-code, and other digital transformation talents.
Propel has collaborated with firms such as the abovementioned as well as Orange Telecoms, Stepstone, and a slew of startups and scaleups across Europe on a variety of projects, including hiring talent, co-creating community hackathons, and building DEI initiatives, to name a few.
Ola stated that, in addition to access to work, tech talent from these communities can get perks such as healthcare and workstation access, and, much later, financial services such as loans and asset finance (through partnerships with service providers).
The two-year-old talent matching company provides this “value-stack” as an all-in-one platform to over 100+ tech communities in 15 African countries, varied in location, gender distribution, and tech stack. SheCodeAfrica, Ingressive for Good, Niyo Network, Datafest, People In Product, Friends of Figma, and different Google Developer Groups are among those having a combined ecosystem of little under 400,000 members.
The 25-person team, based in Amsterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Lagos, London, and Nairobi, has put over 550 people in jobs in various locations.
To date, the company has attracted approximately €3 million in funding from Google Black Founders in Europe and will strive to develop its community platform, create additional client solutions, and extend its ecosystem of communities in the future.
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