Stears has announced a $3.3 million seed round with MaC Venture Capital as the lead investor. Serena Ventures, Luminate Fund of Omidyar Group, Melo 7 Tech Partners, and Cascador (Empowering Economic Growth Foundation) were among the companies that took part in this funding round.

Two years after raising $650,000 in pre-seed financing, Stears has received this announcement. It received some non-dilutive capital as one of the 60 firms approved in 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 specialising in financial news and analysis. Stears Premium, which is its most popular subscription insights product, teaches everyone about Nigerian business and finance, economics, government, and policy. Its content ranges from news and opinion articles to investigative pieces and deep dives.

Customers used the $100/year offer a lot, especially people who worked in different financial institutions across the country.

Stears then aimed the offer at corporations that wanted to pay to support their teams, since corporations have more money to spend.

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.

READ ALSO - Egyptian SaaS Glamera Secures $1.3M to Launch New Services

With the update to Stears Premium and the addition of Stears Pro and Stears Advisory, Stears has become a data and intelligence company. Content on Stears Premium is affected by macro trends and issues like GDP and inflation.

For international organisations 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 now that it has more money to help it change from an insights company to a data company, Stears is getting ready to change how the Pro offering works.

Abdulrahim, COO of the company and a data scientist, says that the data team is working with financial institutions and international development groups to make exclusive, proprietary datasets that are one of a kind.

Stears intends to compile data, engage in deep data analytics, and offer it to its corporate customers in a variety of ways rather than provide 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.

READ ALSO - Kenya Fintech Startup Tanda Secures Funding Round

CEO Ideh compares the advisory product to an R&D arm that is supported by a number of partners. It allows Stears to experiment with data collection and analysis and provides a base for carving out more insights, but it is not scalable and doesn't provide the kind of recurring income that venture-backed businesses need.

The business’s strategy appears to be working so far. Over 75% of revenue now comes from business customers, which is up from 45% in 2021.

As half-year sales for 2022 have already topped full-year sales for 2021, the company also expects sales to four times what they were 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.