Currently studying at the London School of Economics and Oxford Universitya group of graduates realized how difficult it was to obtain data and information about Africa’s largest economy and their home country, Nigeria. Michael Famoloti,economist. Bod Ogunrana,Software Engineer. Abdul Abdul Rahim, Data Scientist.When preston eye daycorporate lawyers — and in 2017 they launched a media startup to address the shortage of information and data-driven insights in the West African country.
Five years later, this startup is Starsannounces a $3.3 million seed round led by Mac Venture Capital. Serena Ventures, Omidyar Group’s Luminate Fund, Melo 7 Tech Partners and Cascador (Empowering Economic Growth Foundation) participated. This news comes two years after Stears Raised $650,000 in pre-seed funding. One of 60 startups Approved to join the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund 2022 Cohort.
Stears started as a media publication focused on Nigerian financial news and insights. His Stears Premium, the company’s flagship subscription insights product, includes everything from news and opinion pieces to investigative articles and in-depth information to educate the public on business, financial, economic, governmental and policy issues in Nigeria. Contains content. The $100-a-year product has seen significant adoption among consumers, especially among employees working for various financial institutions across the country. And because of the high purchasing power of these institutions, Stears then tailored the product for companies that wanted to subscribe on behalf of the team. Subscribers include financial institutions such as Sterling Bank and fintech companies such as Sparkle, PiggyVest and Paystack. The company says its user base has grown organically, mostly at a rate of about 6.5% month-on-month, with total users doubling last year.
“We have a good understanding of the types of information people need. That’s why we focus on standardizing the dissemination of information and building it with the customer in mind,” says Ideh. said in an interview with TechCrunch. “A key part of our business model is to promote high-value subscription data products, such as our own predictive models. will change according to
The iteration of Steers Premium has seen Steers transform into a data and intelligence company alongside the introduction of other products, Steers Pro and Steers Advisory. Macro trends and topics like GDP and inflation drive the content in Stears Premium. Meanwhile, Stears Pro offers more bespoke content on specific issues such as market entry, country analysis and the digital economy for international organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme, the Federal Agency for Foreign Affairs and Knowledge Workers. Large amounts of data for their jobs, including roles such as analysts, portfolio managers, researchers, and economists.
But helping it transition from an insights company to a data company, and fueled by this new investment, Stears is planning a strategic shift for its Pro product. Abdulrahim, his COO and data scientist at the company, said the data organization works with international development and financial institutions to create unique and proprietary data sets that don’t exist anywhere else. So, instead of reporting insights from the data it procures, Stears wants to collate the data, perform in-depth data analysis, and present it to enterprise customers in a variety of formats.
“A key part of our business model is pushing out high-value subscription data products. We will focus more on the overall data on the In the future, we will probably publish data feeds, so we can reduce our text-heavy publishing methods and increase our projections and projections on sectors that are important to knowledge workers and their organizations.”
Steers Advisory — the product Steers wears its consulting hat and takes on third-party projects around its core coverage — has taken a back seat as the company intends to double down on Pro and Premium. CEO Ideh likens the advisory product to a research and development (R&D) department sponsored by various partners, allowing Stears to experiment with data collection and analysis, while providing a foundation for unlocking further insights. and described it as lacking and not scalable. It is a kind of recurring income that venture companies need.
Image credit: Stars
So far, the company’s strategy seems to be working. Enterprise customers now account for over 75% of his revenue, up from 45% in 2021. We also expect earnings to double what he did last year, as half-year earnings in 2022 have already surpassed his full-year earnings in 2021. Revenue growth rate from FY2021 to FY2020.
Data and intelligence company Stairs is in a prime position to get incentives to pursue high-profile political projects that media and tech companies would be interested in. First real-time election databaseOver 2 million Nigerians used it to monitor the general election. Ideh said his company plans to relaunch the election data site, this time with more datasets and features, in anticipation of the 2023 Nigerian elections.
“Bloomberg at its core is a data company. Ide, who has always been vocal about building, said: “This is a big open data initiative for us, and a very important form of data validation that is currently lacking in Nigeria, so we’re also looking at polling.” So, during the election season, we will use a strong data mindset to conduct and push statistically representative polls on Nigeria to understand public opinion issues and drive more robust results. will achieve.”
According to Ideh, the seed investment will move Stears from v2.0, a Nigerian insights company, to v3.0, an Africa-focused data company. The company will use this investment to strengthen its data collection and analytics capabilities, hire data scientists, data analysts and sector analysts, and expand its operations across East Africa via Kenya, South Africa via the country of the same name, and Egypt via Egypt. and plans to expand into North Africa.
“Africa was the original home of man and is now the next frontier for business,” said Marlon Nichols, co-founder and managing general partner of lead investor Mac Venture Capital, of the investment. increase. “Many multinationals and governments understand this to be the reality. Steers is uniquely positioned to provide the unique and accurate data needed to unlock trade and deeper business relationships with African countries and companies. It’s in.”
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