Turns out one of defense tech’s largest seed rounds of the year didn’t come from an Austin or El Segundo startup—it came from Nigeria.
This morning, Terra Industries, founded in 2024 by two Nigerians in their early twenties (not to make you feel too bad about yourselves), announced exclusively to Tectonic that it has raised another $18M to officially close out its $52M seed round.
- Existing backers 8VC, Silent Ventures, Nova Global, Belief Capital, and SV Angel participated in the round, alongside new investor Norleo Space Investments.
- Other all-star investors include Lux Capital and Valor Equity Partners.
- Terra couldn’t comment on the company’s most recent valuation, but CEO Nathan Nwachuku told Tectonic that it was in the nine-figure realm after the $22M seed round extension in February.
Racks on racks: The company first raised $11.75M led by 8VC at the start of the year, then followed that up with a $22M bridge round led by Lux in February.
- The company says it will use allll this new cash money to scale its manufacturing capacity in Africa and build out its presence abroad.
- They’re kicking things off with their first international office in London. Everyone’s touching down in London town.
And all this backing isn’t for nothing. Even before raising millions in funding, Terra had already secured multi-million-dollar contracts with African governments and critical infrastructure (especially oil and mining) operators, protecting roughly $11B in assets.
- In April, Terra also announced its first manufacturing facility outside of Nigeria, a 34,000-square-foot factory in Ghana called Pax-2, which will be Africa’s largest drone factory and where the startup expects to produce 50,000 autonomous systems annually once it’s fully operational in 2028.
Out of curiosity, what did you all accomplish before your 25th birthday?
Terra’s Tech: Now, this ain’t just talk.
Since it was founded in 2024 by Nathan Nwachuku and Maxwell Maduka (who were just 21 and 23, respectively), Terra has moved fast to roll out a wide range of autonomous systems on their way to building the Anduril of Africa (our words, not theirs). So far, those include:
- Archer: A VTOL drone with a 1,000km range, 13 hours of endurance, a 9-pound payload capacity, and a 26-foot wingspan.
- Kallon: A solar-powered sentry tower with AI-enabled edge processing and a whole bunch of sensors to detect and track threats several kilometers away.
- Iroko: A small quadcopter drone for ISR or one-way attacks.
- Kama: A new interceptor drone with a top speed of 300km/h. It’s gone through trials with “several militaries across West Africa” and can be adapted for “air-to-ground interception of enemy vehicles,” Nwachuku told Tectonic earlier this year.
And that tech has been pretty popular with customers on the continent—both military and private sector—to say the least.
According to Nwachuku, Terra’s “on track to record over $100M in contract bookings and eight figures in revenues by year’s end,” and they’re in the final stages of negotiating major contracts “with several African governments and militaries to build and deploy the autonomous systems they need on the battlefield.”
The bulk of that demand is for the “persistent monitoring and autonomous surveillance of infrastructure and high-value sites with products like Archer and Kallon, but that could change quickly as we scale products like Kama,” he added. “Our Pax-2 manufacturing facility, for instance, will be critical to fulfilling orders for unmanned and counter-unmanned aerial vehicles, which are in high demand across African militaries.”
Drone dollars: With this new $18M in funding, the company is planning to expand manufacturing capacity at its Pax-2 facility (it’s close to completion) and open up that office in London.
- Terra is also opening an office in San Francisco and is “establishing a presence in DC to support US partnerships and government engagement.”
- The international expansion “puts us in the rooms where global defense decisions are made,” Nwachuku said.
“The additional strategic funding will help us expand manufacturing capacity as we near completion of our Pax-2 facility,” he added. “This will be pivotal for the next step in Terra’s journey: scaling into other markets across the Global South and building adjacent business lines to accompany our defense deployments.”
