Stears raises $3.3m Seed Fund backed by MaC VC, Serena Ventures, Luminate Fund

Photo Credit: Stears

Stears, a Nigerian data and insights startup, has received $3.3 million in a seed round of financing led by MaC Venture Capital, which included an investment from Serena Williams‘ Ventures Capital firm, Serena Ventures, and others including Omidyar Group’s Luminate Fund, Melo 7 Tech Companions, and Cascador.

Michael Famoroti (an economist), Bode Ogunlana (a software engineer), Abdul Abdulrahim (a data scientist), and Preston Ideh (a corporate lawyer), all met at Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja and went on to graduate from the London School of Economics and Imperial College in the United Kingdom before launching Stears in 2017.

They started a media company to help West African countries like Nigeria get more information and data-driven insights.

According to a Tuesday Bloomberg article, this transaction brings Stears’ total funding to $4 million, after a 2019 pre-seed round led by Omidyar Group’s Luminate Fund.

In an emailed statement seen by Bloomberg, Serena Williams said she would focus more on investing following her retirement from tennis after the U.S. Open in September. “One of the main reasons I invested in Stears is not because of my love and appreciation for Africa, but because Stears has strategically thought of how to increase the investment community on the continent. They’re aware of the complexities and have leverage with data and technology, and I truly respect what they’re doing.”

This isn’t the first time Serena is investing in an African firm. In 2019, Serena’s VC invested in Andela.

Stears was one of 60 firms selected for the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund 2022 cohort, which includes non-dilutive capital, last month.

In 2019, Stears built Nigeria’s first real-time election tracker, and over 2 million Nigerians used it to monitor the general elections. Preston Ideh said in a statement:

Like all startups, it is our job to obsess over the problem we set out to solve and keep learning from our users. We know that the market wants more than just articles, no matter how well-researched. It isn’t just about building Stears 2.0 in the 54 African countries; that is not the goal. To be the most trusted source of data and insights in Africa, a >$1 trillion economy with >1 billion people, the continent needs deep, reliable, regular streams of data, not just articles or reports. To provide this, we know what we must do next: focus on making proprietary data, models, tools and forecasts directly available to our users.

What does this look like?

It means building the most valuable database on African economies and markets. It means expanding our intelligence team into Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt. It means developing local expertise that cannot be replicated with remote offices.

To become the most trusted source of data and insights, we have to do three things that haven’t been done in Africa before; first, identify all existing sources of data; second, design a shared language to understand all the data; and third; combine these datasets to create proprietary views of the African market that don’t exist anywhere else.

“Africa is home to the first humans and is now the next frontier for business,” said Marlon Nichols, co-founder and managing general partner at lead investor MaC Venture Capital on the investment. “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.”