Stears has announced a $3.3 million seed round with MaC Venture Capital as the lead investor. Participating companies included Serena Ventures, Luminate Fund of Omidyar Group, Melo 7 Tech Partners, and Cascador (Empowering Economic Growth Foundation).
Two years after raising $650,000 in pre-seed finance, Stears has received this announcement. It received some non-dilutive capital as one of the 60 firms approved into the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund 2022 batch last month.
To address the lack of knowledge and data-driven insights in the West African nation, Preston Ideh, a corporate lawyer, Michael Famoroti, a data scientist, Bode Ogunlana, a software developer, and Abdul Abdulrahim founded a media business in 2017.
In Nigeria, Stears began as a media outlet specializing in financial news and analysis. Stears Premium, its flagship subscription insights product, educates the entire public on topics related to business and finance, economics, government, and policy in Nigeria. Its content ranges from news and opinion articles to investigative pieces and deep dives.
Customers, especially workers working in various finance-related institutions across the nation, heavily utilized the $100/year offering.
Stears then targeted the offering to corporations who wished to subscribe in favor of their teams since these institutions have more purchasing power.
Financial institutions including Sterling Bank and fintech companies like Sparkle, PiggyVest, and Paystack are among its subscribers.
According to the company, its user base has doubled in size over the past year, growing mostly organically at a rate of about 6.5% per month.
Stears has evolved into a data and intelligence firm with the iteration of Stears Premium and the addition of the products Stears Pro and Stears Advisory. Content on Stears Premium is influenced by macro trends and issues like GDP and inflation.
For international organizations like the United Nations Development Programme, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, and the knowledge workers who work in them, including roles like analysts, portfolio managers, researchers, and economists, Stears Pro, on the other hand, offers more tailored content around particular issues like market entry, country analysis, and the digital economy.
But with this fresh funding supporting its move from an insights company to a data company, Stears is preparing a change in approach for the Pro offering.
Abdulrahim, the company’s COO and data scientist, claims that the data team is collaborating with financial institutions and international development organizations to create exclusive, proprietary datasets that are unique.
Stears intends to compile data, engage in deep data analytics, and offer it to its corporate customers in a variety of ways rather than providing insights from the data it sources.
Stears Advisory, the product where the company assumes its consultant role and takes on outside projects related to its main coverage, will be put on hold while the company focuses more on Pro and Premium.
The Advisory product, which CEO Ideh compares to an R&D arm supported by various partners, enables Stears to experiment with data gathering and analysis and serves as the foundation for carving out additional insights, but it is not scalable and lacks the kind of recurring income that venture-backed businesses require.
The business’s strategy appears to be working so far. Over 75% of revenues are currently generated by enterprise customers, up from 45% in 2021.
As half-year revenues for 2022 have already exceeded full-year revenues for 2021, it also anticipates revenues to quadruple from last year. In contrast, revenue increased by 80% between FY 2021 and FY 2020.
Ideh claims that the seed funding will transform Stears from a v2.0, a Nigerian insight firm, to a v3.0, an African data company.
The company intends to use the funding to grow to East Africa through Kenya, Southern Africa through the aforementioned nation, and North Africa through Egypt. It also hopes to add data scientists, data analysts, and sector analysts.
Techbuild’s Take
It is undeniable that digital technology is a force that drives the commercial world forward indefinitely. Therefore, it only makes sense to think that one very particular, very appealing feature, data, is what drives, shapes, and impacts the digital environment.
As a result, businesses now view data fundamentally differently. Today, data itself has grown to be a crucial component of a company’s digital plan. In fact, businesses frequently use it as the primary component of their digital strategy.
On a modest scale, developing a manual method to evaluate a few different data sets can be considered data intelligence. On a much broader scale, this can encompass digital resources such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, data definitions, data catalogs, and many more. This is what Stears is all about.
Stears is in a unique position as a data and intelligence company where it is encouraged to explore political initiatives that would garner notice if it were a media or internet company. The business started one such endeavor in 2019 by creating Nigeria’s first real-time election database.
It was used to observe the general elections by more than 2 million Nigerians. In advance of Nigeria’s 2023 elections, Ideh said his organization plans to rebuild the election data platform, this time with more datasets and functions.
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