• Stears

  Participated · Seed · Oct 2022

  Stears began as a Nigeria-focused financial news publication and now offers subscription products including Stears Premium, Stears Pro and Stears Advisory. Its flagship Stears Premium is a $100-per-year product tailored to both individual knowledge workers and businesses; enterprise customers now account for over 75% of revenue, up from 45% in 2021. The company reports organic user growth of roughly 6.5% month-on-month and has doubled its total users over the last year; half-year 2022 revenues have already surpassed full-year 2021, and management expects revenues to double year-over-year. Stears is shifting from producing text-heavy reports toward proprietary data feeds, deeper analytics and forecast models, and plans to reduce bespoke consulting in favor of scalable subscription data products. It intends to produce exclusive datasets with international development and financial institutions, relaunch its election database with expanded datasets and run statistically representative polls for Nigeria’s 2023 elections. The company plans to hire data scientists, analysts and sector experts and expand into east Africa through Kenya, southern Africa through the eponymous country and north Africa through Egypt. Stears began in 2017 at the London School of Economics as a media publication focused on financial news in Nigeria and later pivoted into the information services industry. The company runs Stears Business, a niche media publication on economics, finance, and policymaking, and Stears Data, its data collection, research, and analytics arm. Stears positions itself against advertising-driven models to protect editorial independence and generate revenue through information services. The startup is led by Preston Ideh, Abdul Abdulrahim, Foluso Ogunlana, and Michael Famoroti. With a newly raised seed investment, Stears plans to hire talent, continue data collection, explore new business models, and launch CoreData, a digital data platform providing sub-national economic and demographic data to governments and corporations in June 2020. No operating metrics (revenue or users) are disclosed in the article.

No current team members are available.