Nigerian startup, Stears, focused on sourcing data and insights for Africans and providing data collection tools for businesses, financial and policy professionals, has raised a $3.3 million seed round led by MaC Venture Capital.
Other notable investors were Serena Ventures, Omidyar Group’s Luminate Fund, Melo 7 Tech Partners and Cascador — Empowering Economic Growth Foundation.
Stears, which was among Google for Startups Black Founders Fund 2022 cohort, will leverage the fund to enhance its data collection and analytics capabilities, hire data scientists, data analysts and sector analysts, and expand to Kenya in East Africa, South Africa and Egypt in North Africa.
Michael Famoroti, Bode Ogunlana, Abdul Abdulrahim, and Preston Ideh, founded Stears in 2017 as a media publication company focused on financial news and insights in Nigeria. The goal was to address the insufficiency of information and data-driven insights in the country.
With the new investment, Stears is planning to modify its product and is working with international development and financial institutions to produce proprietary and exclusive datasets that are not yet in existence.
The startup will now go beyond reporting insights from sourced data, to collating data, engaging in deep data analytics and presenting it to business customers in several formats.
Two years ago, Stears raised $650 million in pre-seed funding. So far, its enterprise customers contribute over 75% of revenues, increasing from 45% in 2021. It also expects revenues to double from last year as half-year revenues for 2022 have already surpassed full-year revenues for 2021. This is compared to the 80% revenue growth between FY 2021 and FY 2020.
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