Prior to her official retirement from Tennis in September, Serena Williams hinted on her next plans to extend her legacies and impact on humanity, one of which is to fully engage herself in entrepreneurship and investment financing which she said has been a long-term aspiration since her active years in sport. In late September, William’s co-owned Venture Capital firm, Serena Ventures announced that it was participating in a 12.3million equity-debt funding round for Uganda-based fintech Numida, which focuses on lending to small enterprise.
Over the course of the week, a group of young Nigerians that steer the wheels of Stears InC, a data analytics and insights firm, made a seed round of $US3.3million from a consortium which includes Serena Ventures, MaC ventures, Omidyar Group’s Luminate fund, Melo, 7Tech partners and Cascador. The fundraising which was led by MaC venture Capital was said to mark the latest African investment by Serena Ventures.
In a statement released on Monday, stears’ CEO, Preston Ideh, confirmed the sealing of the seed investment, stating the funding would take stears from v2.0, a Nigerian Insight company, to a v3.0, a African-,focussed data company. It was also stated that the funding would enable stears to enhance its operations, increase and strengthen its pool of experts as well as expand to east Africa through Kenya, southern Africa through the eponymous country and north Africa through Egypt. According to Ideh,
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“Like all startups, it is our job to obsess over the problem we set out to solve and keep learning from our users. We know that the market wants more than just articles, no matter how well-researched. It isn’t just about building Stears 2.0 in the 54 African countries; that is not the goal.
“To be the most trusted source of data and insights in Africa, rather than produce solely insights from sourced data, focus will be on making proprietary data, models tools and forecast directly available to our users.”
According Bloomberg’s report, the financing round shoots stears’ cumulative funding to 4million following a 2019 pre-seed round of $650,000 led by Omidyar Group’s Luminate Fund.
Launched in 2017 by four co-founders, Michael Famoroti, Bode Ogunlana , Abdukrahim and Preston Ideh who started their entreprenueral journey way back in high school in Nigeria, Stears aims to solve information and data-related problem and produce interactive data and analysis visualisations that will build the most valuable database on African economies.
In 2019, stears created Nigeria’s first real-time election tracker, which drew two million unique users during the general election cycle and attracted widespread readership and investor attention to the main site. According to TechCrunch, Stears recently made the list of 60 startups accepted into the Google for startups Black Founders fund 2022 cohort, which included some non-dilutive funding, reported Techcrunch. The company says it has grown its userbase organically at around 6.5% month-on-month doubling its total number of users over the last year.
According to the People’s Gazzette, Serena Williams justified her company’s investment in Stears as follows:
“one of the main reasons I invested in Stears is not because of my love and appreciation for Africa but because Stears has strategically thought of how to increase the investment community on the continent.
“They are aware of the complexities and have leverage with data and technology and I truly respect what they are doing”.
Serena Williams Bills Her Venture Capital Firm as an Avenue to Extend Her Legacies After Retirement