Africa might not come to mind as a defense tech hotspot, but a startup founded by two Nigerians in their early twenties is changing that—and catching the eye of the defense tech world’s venture capital heavyweights.
Early this morning, Nigerian autonomous systems startup Terra Industries announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it’s raised an $11.75M seed round led by 8VC and an all-star cast of participating funds, including Lux Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Silent Ventures, and others.
When you’re building the Anduril of Africa, it helps to have the kingmakers on your side.
Terra taking off: Founded in 2024—when CEO Nathan Nwachuku and his co-founder Maxwell Maduka were just 21 and 23, respectively—Terra is laser-focused on helping bring security to a region and continent rife with conflict.
“Africa is industrializing faster than any other region right now, with the fastest-growing demographic in the world,” Nwachuku told Tectonic. “It was clear to us that Africa is on the path to becoming the industrial engine of the world, but it cannot get there if we don’t solve what I felt was the biggest Achilles heel, which is terrorism and insecurity.”
Terra’s tech: To achieve that, Terra raised a small pre-seed round—just a few hundred thousand dollars—in 2023 and opened up a 15,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Abuja, Nigeria, where they’ve quickly ramped up production of a whole range of autonomous systems and the software that powers them.
- Archer VTOL: A mid-range mass-producible VTOL drone with a 9lb payload capacity.
- Duma UGV: A small autonomous and payload-agnostic unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) platform for ground surveillance and site protection.
- Iroko UAV: A small quadcopter drone for infrastructure inspection and first response operations.
- Kallon: A solar-powered sentry tower with AI-enabled edge processing and a whole bunch of sensors to detect and track threats up to 3km away.
- ArtemisOS: Terra’s in-house open operating system that runs across all their systems and collects, analyzes, and protects surveillance data to power threat detection and autonomy.
“They’re all capturing multispectral data and feeding that into ArtemisOS, our data intelligence operating system, which basically collects all this data, synthesizes it, and identifies and tracks threats, whether it’s terrorist groups, bandits, or whatever,” Nwachuku said. “Once the threat has been identified, it alerts the response teams.”
Hot start: Terra may be young, but governments and companies are tapping them to help secure critical infrastructure in some of the world’s most dangerous places.
The company has signed contracts to deploy its autonomous systems to protect roughly $11B in assets, including power and hydropower plants, pipelines, and mining operations in Nigeria and Ghana.
With over 30 percent of global critical mineral reserves and a rapidly growing array of threats from terror groups that finance their operations from mineral theft, the startup has plenty of room to grow in Africa’s infrastructure security sector. But Nwachuku and Maduka are thinking bigger.
“We’re still very focused on surveillance and protecting critical infrastructure, but this time around, we also want to help governments … go on the offensive against terrorists by providing intelligence and support to their operations,” Nwachuku said. “We’re trying to build the systems and the intelligence and surveillance layer for security across the continent.”
Young money: With fresh capital in hand, Terra is moving fast to scale production—including at a new factory in another undisclosed African country—and their engineering team.
But—in a plot twist rarely seen in defense tech land—that $12M in VC money is actually dwarfed by the contracts they’ve signed. According to Nwachuku, Terra has inked tens of millions in commercial and government contracts so far, with a whole bunch of others in the pipeline.
Between that and raising a star-studded seed round—which Dominion Dynamics founder, former Anduril exec, and Terra’s first investor Eliot Pence told Tectonic is “the most important venture deal in Africa’s history”—Nwachuku is feeling pretty good about where Terra’s headed.
“You know, most different companies at our stage have prototypes,” he said. “We actually have products out in the field, currently protecting real assets and leading to the arrests of actual terrorists. The difference between us and a lot of other companies is that our shit is actually working.”