Nigerian media company, Stears secures $600,000 seed round funding.
Nigerian media company, Stears has secured $600,000 seed funding from undisclosed Nigerian investors with participation from Luminate, a philanthropic organization founded by the Omidyar Group.
The new fund will be used to grow the startup’s team, collect data, and build out its media and information products.
This platform follows the problem of accessing data and information in Nigeria.
The CEO of Stears, Preston Ideh disclosed “We believe that the problem we are built, designed and exist to solve is the information gap”.
“Our mission regardless of the product or platform is always to make it easy for anyone to access high-quality information on Nigeria”
The idea of Stears came up with when the founders realized that getting information about Nigeria was a hard knot to crack.
The platform gives analytical articles regarding the Nigerian economy and government policies.
Preston further said, “The average reader is not interested in Excel spreadsheets. They want an article; they want storytelling.”
According to Preston, Stears Business operated a very low-cost model. The company had no full-time writer neither did it pay writers to produce articles.
Rather its content has created a network of freelance writers. These writers include students from various universities and domain experts in areas like economics, finance, and policymaking.
Last year, the company launched Stears Data, its analytics and data intelligence arm which focuses on reports, research, and a few other data products.
The company is hoping to unveil CoreData in June this year, a flagship data platform for the enterprise.
Apart from Stears Data, the team developed a real-time election data center for the 2019 elections in Nigeria.
Also, Stears Business has developed a live COVID-19 case monitoring platform due to the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic.
Before the funding, Stears hired new staff economists, data scientists, and developers. Today, the company has 17 workers, up from five in 2019.
Stears was established in 2017 by Preston Ideh, Abdul Abdulrahim, Foluso Ogunlana, and Michael Famoroti while they were all studying in the UK.