By Emma Hinchliffe

(Mashable) For tech companies to continue to grow, they need talent. And if one startup has its way, a big chunk of that talent is going to come from Africa.

“It’s our belief that Africa is the largest pool of underutilized brainpower in the world,” Jeremy Johnson, the CEO and co-founder of Andela, said on this week’s episode of Mashable‘s Biz Please podcast. “And it is better for everyone in the world if that situation is changed.”

Andela trains developers and engineers throughout the African continent and then pairs them with companies like Microsoft and IBM. The 2-year-old startup helps tech companies scale their teams through a distributed workforce of top talent.

Andela, which has campuses in Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya, has a 0.7 percent acceptance rate to its program on the developers’ side of things. CNN called it the “startup that’s harder to get into than Harvard” and the startup calls itself “Africa’s first elite engineering organization.”

“Brilliance and aptitude is evenly distributed throughout the planet,” Johnson said on Biz Please. “Opportunity, very different, but aptitude, it’s pretty consistent.”

Andela has quickly drawn a lot of attention for its model. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative led its first-ever funding round on behalf of Andela in June, raising $24 million in Series B funding for the company. Mark Zuckerberg visited Andela’s campus in Lagos in August to meet with its developers.

During the week of the US-Africa Business Forum, which brought African heads of state and business leaders to New York, Johnson sat down with Mashable in Andela’s New York City offices to talk about Andela’s future, the potential for distributed workforces and why Africa has been underestimated in tech.

Listen to more about Andela and its model below. For more Biz Please, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and find them here on Stitcher.