Gebeya, the Pan-African source for freelance professional talent, has announced the launch of its revamped marketplace, the first of its kind in terms of reach in Africa.
Prior to investment, Gebeya operated mostly a manual non-scalable marketplace model. Gebeya raised a $2M seed investment in Feb 2020, co-led by Partech and Orange Ventures and followed by Consonance Investment Managers, to set up the machine for scale, fully automated and digitised.
Gebeya.com connects startups and small and medium enterprises to professional talents from across the continent. The platform offers a self-service single gateway for clients to create a profile and gain instant access to pre-vetted, qualified talents offering professional services and ready to work.
Gebeya customers can choose from remote or on-site talent in fields such as software development, graphic design, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, product development, and digital marketing.
It boasts of features such as an intelligent matching algorithm that considers location, language, and budget; provides automated matching for a seamless experience on a single dashboard, the ability to create a profile and request talent at no cost; and an option to hire individual talent with specialised skills or build a core team.
New features on the platform will connect businesses with talent in minutes. Visitors to the Gebeya Marketplace are matched with freelancers from a carefully curated pool, trusted by multinational telecommunications companies like Orange, as well as e-commerce startups such as Limestart, and logistics startup Paps.
“It’s time for businesses to leverage the sharp skills and fresh perspective that freelancers infuse into a permanent workforce,” said Amadou Daffe, CEO and Co-founder of Gebeya.
“Africa doesn’t have a talent deficiency; it has a matching problem and that is what Gebeya is seeking to address through the deployment of a true Pan-African freelance marketplace. Freelancers are part of a smart, agile hiring strategy. We plan to expand our pool of skilled freelance talent to 15,000 within the next 3 years.”
Africa claims only 1.4% of the total addressable gig and freelancer economy industry, a figure estimated at $1.5 trillion with North America accounting for over half of the world’s freelancers, according to a 2017 report from Freelance Statistics. $486 million of that amount went to tech freelancers. According to the same report, there are seventy-seven million identified freelance workers globally.
As experts project, freelancers will constitute 80% of the workforce by 2030.
The company’s vision is to unlock the power of the skilled workforce on the continent, and increase the number of innovative startups leading the helm of digital transformation.
Gebeya.com closes the gap between companies and their next best hires. In the first six months since the launch of the Gebeya Talent app, thousands of freelancers from 27 African countries have flocked to join the pool.
The upgraded gebeya.com demonstrates the company’s continued success identifying and sealing the gaps for entrepreneurs within many companies, while maximising a growing freelance market that produces competitive, multilingual, certified and skilled talent.
