Tunga, a marketplace for software engineers, is expanding to Egypt according to Ernesto Spruyt, the founder. "We are planning to expand our community in Egypt in the short term," he wrote.
As part of their market entry strategy, the startup is setting up partnerships in the country. "In this case, we already have partnered on the ground through our collaboration with WeAreBits," Ernesto wrote.
They are also organizing an event at the GrEEK Campus in Cairo on Sunday the 23rd of September. This is with the goal of meeting any interested developers. "Those interested can apply and go through the screening process to see if their skills are up to standard."
Tunga, founded in 2015, has most of its operations in Uganda with an office at Design Hub Kampala. Though Ernesto says that their community of developers comes from Uganda and Nigeria. With both countries contributing 45% each. The rest is distributed across Egypt, Kenya, and Cameroon.
Currently, the startup has 220 developers and have served 100 cleints since inception. Yet what is more exciting for Ernesto is their growth and profitability. "This year we're almost tripling our turnover, and for the first time we're running a profitable company," he wrote.
"Although we're re-investing most of it into further growth. In summary, we're a financially healthy, fast-growing company."
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The startup operates a model that is close to what Andela and Gebeya use. "We execute software projects and hire out (remote) developers and development teams," Ernesto wrote. This implies that Tunga is contracted and further sub-contracts the developers. "On the one hand, the client pays us, and we pay the developers."
Though, unlike Andela, Tunga's developers are more like freelancers as they can work from anywhere as opposed to going to an office.
To date, Tunga hasn't raised any equity round. "We did not receive any equity finance nor any loans," Ernesto wrote. Adding that "to be frank, I'm quite proud of that!"
But, they have received a couple of grants to keep them going. "At the start, we received EUR 115,000 in grants from a group of philanthropic funds," he wrote. These were; Dioraphte, the DOEN Foundation, Edukans, and Triodos Foundation.
They followed this up with another grant from Oxfam, though it came with conditions. "[We got] around EUR 50,000 from Oxfam to recruit and train developers specifically in Nigeria and Egypt, under their ambitious work in Progress program."