Stears, a financial data and intelligence company, has secured $3.3 million seed capital from both local and foreign investors. This takes the company’s total funding to $4 million.
The new funding will be used to enhance Stears’ data collection and analytics capabilities, talent acquisition and expansion to East and Southern Africa.
The investors include MaC Venture Capital which led the round, with participation from Serena William’s Serena Ventures, Melo7 Tech Partners, Omidyar Group’s Luminate Fund, Cascador and Hoaq Club.
Williams noted that more investment can be created in Africa with better and more transparent business and financial circumstances data
“Stears has shown a deep appreciation of the complexities involved in solving this problem for global professionals. Through a combination of technology and data, Stears is well placed to leverage the massive data opportunity on the continent,” Williams said.
Founded on 6 January 2017, Stears, provides subscription-based data and insight to global businesses and professionals. It recently got accepted into the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund 2022 cohort, which included some non-dilutive funding.
“We know global professionals need our data and insight because banks, research firms, development organisations and investors are already using our early products. Our customers tell us we are building a ‘systemically important’ company to address Africa’s data problem,” said Preston Ideh, Stears CEO.
Stears started as a response to the lack of data-driven insights on the African continent. It came to life after the four founders, Michael Famoroti, an economist; Bode Ogunlana, a software engineer; Abdul Abdulrahim, a data scientist and Preston Ideh, graduates of the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford, decided to team up and start an insights company focused on Nigeria. The multidisciplinary backgrounds of the founders made it easy to work with different kinds of datasets, and the startup evolved into a data and intelligence company.
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In 2019, the team built Nigeria’s first real-time election database, which over 2 million Nigerians used to monitor the general elections. Buoyed by the 2019 success, they raised pre-seed funding of $650,000, making the total amount raised to date $4 million. In November 2022, Stears plans to relaunch the election data site, in anticipation of Nigeria’s 2023 elections.
Stears’ customers can make intelligent decisions about African economies and markets by leveraging publicly available macroeconomic and financial data, its proprietary datasets and Stears’ deep analytical expertise.
“Globally, information providers like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters have built data powerhouses which act as information gateways to Western markets. We are executing an African version of this model, focused on the often missing, outdated or poorly digitised African datasets needed by operators, finance and policy professionals, researchers and even regulators,” Ideh said.
Three ways Stears converts its data into searchable information is first by identifying all existing sources of data; secondly, designing a shared language to understand all the data; and thirdly, combining public and proprietary datasets to create new views of African markets.
Its flagship product is a subscription insights product which has become a trusted source of insight into the Nigerian market. Originally built as a consumer product, the company has seen uptake with financial institutions like Sterling Bank, Vetiva Investment Bank and Sparkle, fintechs like Piggyvest & Paystack and some of the most prominent global institutions in Africa, including the United Nations Development Programme, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office and the European Investment Bank.
“Our experience with our flagship insights product, Stears Premium, introduced us to significant demand for more than just insights. Now, we are working with international development institutions and financial institutions to produce proprietary and exclusive datasets that don’t exist anywhere else. With this new investment, we can expand our data coverage to target the needs of global professionals who want direct access to our data, not just our insight,” said Abdul Abdulrahim COO and data scientist.
For Marlon Nichols, co-founder and managing general partner at MaC Venture Capital, the notion that Africa is the next frontier for business provides a motivation for investing in the continent.
“Many multinational corporations and governments understand this to be a reality. They also appreciate that several African countries are subject to unique business processes and are primarily cash-based economies, which results in understated GDP, among other things. Stears is uniquely positioned to provide the proprietary and accurate data needed to unlock trade and deeper business relationships with African countries and companies,” Nichols said.
