Tech in Africa
Stears, Nigerian digital media and information startup, has secured $600K in seed funding. The investment was courtesy of Luminate, one of the organizations that make up the Omidyar Group. Luminate made the investment alongside two other anonymous Nigerian venture capital funds.
Stears was birthed at the London School of Economics, as a financial news publication on Nigeria. The organization’s founders are Abdul Abdulrahim, Preston Ideh, Michael Famoroti, and Foluso Ogunlana.
Media businesses across the globe are struggling with dwindling advertising revenue. The situation is even worse across the African continent given the lack of enthusiasm by the readers to adopt subscription models. Given the strong connections of political power to corporate business and government advertising preferences, this creates an independence-dilemma for media outlets.
Having been operational for 3 years, the startup owns Stears Business, a niche digital publication on finance, economics, and policymaking. The company also owns Stears Data, focusing on data collection, analytics and research.
The investment will go into talent acquisition, data collection, exploration of working business models, and the launch of CoreData, a digital platform that will empower governments and corporations with direct access to sub-national economic and demographic data by June 2020.
In an interview with Techpoint Africa, Stears CEO, Preston Ideh explained how they initially intended to solve an information gap within the continent. That was the motivation behind their launch of Stears Business, and a yardstick from which they could expand their horizon into other information sectors. He also pointed out their resilience and ability to make it this far without sacrificing their editorial independence for ad revenue as a sign of their reputation as a “trusted source of information.”
