- Nigerian data company, Stears, has closed a $3.3 million seed round to expand to other African regions.
- MaC Venture Capital led the round. Serena Ventures, the Luminate Fund of the Omidyar Group, Melo 7 Tech Partners, and Cascador also took part.
- Stears, one of the 60 startups selected for the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund 2022 batch in September 2022, plans to use the funds to improve its data collection and analysis.
Michael Famoroti, Bode Ogunlana, Abdul Abdulrahim, and Preston Ideh founded Stears in 2017 to solve Nigeria's lack of information and data-driven insights.
The company started as a media platform for financial news and analysis in Nigeria. However, it now wants to concentrate on data in Africa.
Its flagship subscription insights product, Stears Premium, sensitises the general public on topics related to business and finance, economics, government, and policy in Nigeria through several content types, including news, opinion, investigative pieces, and deep dives.
Stears has evolved into a data and intelligence firm because of the iteration of Stears Premium and the launch of additional products — Stears Pro and Stears Advisory.
Macro trends and issues like Gross Domestic Profit and inflation drives Stears Premium's content. However, specific problems like market entry, country analysis, and the digital economy influence Stears Pro.
Stears Advisory, the product where the company assumes a consulting role and takes on outside initiatives related to its core coverage, will be put on hold as Stears focuses more on Pro and Premium.
Ideh claims that the product lacks the scalability and recurring revenue required for venture-backed companies.
The company will collaborate with international development organisations and financial institutions to create datasets that, according to Ideh, are not available elsewhere.
Stears plans to gather data, perform deep data analytics, and offer it to its business customers in several ways other than just reporting insights from the data it sources.
Join over 3,000 founders and investors
Give it a try, you can unsubscribe anytime. Privacy Policy.
The company also plans to use the funding to hire data scientists, data analysts, and sector analysts.
