Stears, a pan-African financial data and intelligence company, has announced that it has successfully completed a seed round of funding in the amount of $3.3 million. MaC Venture Capital served as the round’s leader, and Serena Ventures, Melo 7 Tech Partners, Cascador, and Hoaq Club were among the investors who took part in the funding. Stears has stated that it intends to use this investment to strengthen its data collecting and analytics skills, as well as its ability to acquire talent and expand throughout East and Southern Africa.

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“With this new investment, we can expand our data coverage to target the needs of global professionals who want direct access to our data, not just our insight,” says Abdul Abdulrahim, the company’s COO and data scientist.

Why The Investors Invested

Commenting on the fundraising, Marlon Nichols, co-founder and managing general partner at MaC Venture Capital says, “Stears is uniquely positioned to provide the proprietary and accurate data needed to unlock trade and deeper business relationships with African countries and companies.”

Tennis star Serena Williams, who is also the founder and managing general partner at Serena Ventures, says: “Better and more transparent business and financial data is expected to lead to more investment in the African continent. Stears has shown a deep appreciation of the complexities involved in solving this problem for global professionals. Through a combination of technology and data, Stears is well placed to leverage the massive data opportunity on the continent.”

A Look At What The Startup Does

Stears is a financial data and intelligence firm that was established in 2017. It provides businesses and professionals all around the world with data and insight in exchange for a monthly membership fee.

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“Globally, information providers like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters have built data powerhouses which act as information gateways to Western markets. We are executing an African version of this model, focused on the often missing, outdated or poorly digitised African datasets needed by operators, finance and policy professionals, researchers and even regulators.” said Preston Ideh, Stears CEO.

To this day, Stears’ most successful offering has been a subscription insights product that has established itself as a reliable source of intelligence on the Nigerian market. The company’s initial focus was on the consumer market, but it has since expanded its customer base to include financial institutions such as banks and fintech companies, as well as some of the most well-known international organisations active in Africa. These organisations include the United Nations Development Programme, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, and the European Investment Bank.

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According to Abdulrahim, the firm is now collaborating with international development organisations and financial institutions to build proprietary and exclusive datasets that are unavailable anywhere else. These datasets are produced exclusively for the company.

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert. 
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh