The news comes a month after the startup was selected to participate in the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund 2022.

Pan-African data intelligence company Stears announced Tuesday (October 11), the raise of US$3.3 million in its seed funding round.  The round was led by MaC Venture Capital with participation from Serena Ventures, Serena Williams' investment company, and other investors.  

“We know global professionals need our data and insight because banks, research firms, development organizations, 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,” explains Stears’ CEO, Preston Ideh.

Stears was launched, in 2017, by three students who realized, by experience, that data and information about Nigeria, their country and Africa’s largest economy, were hard to come by. Combining their skills, they set up Stears to address this lack of information.

According to the CEO, the Stears website is the African version of Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, two of the world's most trusted information providers. Stears identifies, combines, and markets the often missing, outdated, or poorly digitized data needed by traders, financial professionals, politicians, researchers, and even regulators.

In 2019, the team created Nigeria's first real-time election database, which was used by more than two million Nigerians to monitor the general election. After that experience, they raised US$650,000 in pre-seed funding. 

With the resources raised during the seed round, Stears plans to collect data, perform in-depth analysis, and offer the analysis to their commercial customers in several ways beyond simply reported news.  The company also plans to hire data scientists and analysts as well as industry analysts and expand in East and Southern Africa.

Samira Njoya