Jun 11th 2026|ABUJA|3 min read
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AI Narrated
IN AMERICA OR Europe, mapping out a public company’s ownership structure takes a few clicks on a Bloomberg terminal. In Nigeria, you might need to rely on a website that coughs up ten-year-old data. Seven hours at an office in Abuja, the capital, could yield a dusty but more up-to-date document, as might a trip to the stock exchange if the company in question has ever been publicly listed.
Few foreigners are willing to do the legwork, which helps explain why Africa gets around 5% of the world’s foreign direct investment and accounts for less than 1% of the market capitalisation of its listed companies. Stears, a nine-year-old Nigerian company, offers to go the extra mile. At the Nigerian bourse, one of its executives even cosied up to the stock exchange’s librarian, begging him (in the name of God) to release a USB drive where he was rumoured to store company details as a pastime.
The company’s co-founders dreamed up the idea in the mid-2010s while studying in London.“We saw Bloomberg and thought it was sexy,” recalls Preston Ideh, the chief executive. They initially copied the American company’s mix of news and data. Yet when subscriber growth turned out to be insufficient to support the media operation, they focused squarely on financial information.
Not all of it is as inaccessible as Nigerian stock-market secrets. But little is readily available. Stears analysts have, among other things, had a loose-lipped employee slip them a ballpark figure of an undisclosed deal; monitored podcasts with startup founders who might share a bit too much; reverse-engineered the website of Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics to scrape it for historical macroeconomic data; and even become citizens in countries where, as in Kenya, a domestic passport eases access to official repositories (and where hiring a local would cost more).
The firm can afford to go to such lengths because a lot of the data it gathers is for bespoke projects where customers such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development or private-equity firms interested in Africa’s sports-betting market pay up to $100,000 a pop. But further information, plus contacts collected in the process, feeds its digital platform, where the volume of data added increased fivefold last year. This is available to clients on a subscription basis similar to Bloomberg and other Western rivals such as S&P Global’s Capital IQ and PitchBook (from which Stears has poached staff).
Foreigners are increasingly interested in what Stears is offering. Its dollar revenue (a proxy for its non-Nigerian business) doubled in 2025 and made up 70% of its total licence fees, up from 18% in 2023. Over the same period the average annual licence fee paid by fund managers climbed from $2,500 to $9,500. This is still a bargain compared with $30,000 or so for a Bloomberg terminal.
Helpfully for Stears, the Western platforms currently have little interest in Africa, which accounts for a tiny fraction of the world’s financial flows. This may change as that fraction grows, which it inevitably will. By then, though, the African upstart wants to be as indispensable to the Africa-curious investor as Bloomberg is to everybody else. ■
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