Africa might not come to mind as a defense tech hotspot, but Terra Industries is changing that—quickly.
In an exclusive announcement to Tectonic this morning, 8VC and Lux Capital-backed Nigerian drone startup Terra Industries unveiled its new 34,000-square-foot factory in Accra, Ghana, called Pax-2. The facility will be the company’s first outside Nigeria and, with production expected to reach 50,000 systems annually, the largest drone factory in Africa.
Young money: Terra’s founders, Nathan Nwachuku (CEO) and Maxwell Maduka, may be in their early 20s, but they’ve already executed like defense tech vets. Since launching the company in 2024, they’ve quickly secured tens of millions of dollars in contracts and venture funding from, like, the biggest names in the game.
- Their early customers were in the commercial world—power plant, pipeline, and mining operators. Their drones are deployed to protect over $11B in critical infrastructure assets.
- They’ve since inked tens of millions of dollars in military contracts from Nigeria and other countries, fulfilling all those orders out of a 15,000-square-foot factory (Pax-1) in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja.
All those wins meant it was only a matter of time before the VCs came calling:
- In January, they raised an $11.75M seed round led by 8VC and tacked on a $22M bridge round led by Lux Capital weeks later.
- That ~$34M in funding to date has given the two-year-old company a “nine-figure valuation,” according to Nwachuku.
Pax Africana: A big part of that success comes down to Terra’s ambitious mission: Bringing security to a region and continent rife with conflict using advanced technology. Nwachuku calls this vision “Pax Africana,” hence those clever factory names.
And why Ghana? Nwachuku said the West African country checked pretty much all the boxes for their first factory abroad.
“Ghana just makes sense as a country—it’s one of the safest in Africa right now, and it’s also one of the fastest growing economies [with a] strong currency, strong manufacturing base, really smart people, and a high political will to want to lead the continent in terms of industrial development and sovereign defense,” he told Tectonic. “For us, that matters the most when looking for where to situate our first major regional manufacturing facility.”
Terra’s tech: At full capacity, Pax-2 will churn out over 50,000 autonomous systems a year (it’ll be up and running in June).
The tech that’ll come off the line at Pax-2 will include some of Terra’s best-selling drones—and their first offering in the white-hot world of counter-drone tech:
- Archer: A VTOL drone with a 1,000km range, 13 hours of endurance, a 9-pound payload capacity, and a 26-foot wingspan.
- Iroko: A small quadcopter drone for ISR or one-way attacks.
- Kama: A new interceptor drone with a top speed of 300km/h. Kama hasn’t yet been publicly unveiled, but it’s in trials with “several militaries across West Africa” and can be adapted for “air-to-ground interception of enemy vehicles,” Nwachuku said.
Ramping up: Terra’s already pumping out Archers, a whole bunch of Iroko UAVs, and 20 Kama interceptor prototypes every day at their Abuja factory, but with Pax-2 they’ll focus on ramping up mass-production of the latter two.
The decision to go into the c-UAS space was pretty obvious, Nwachuku said. Aside from sky-high demand making interceptors a bit of a seller’s market abroad, the drone threat is escalating at home, too.
“A lot of the tactics and technologies that are being used in the Middle East and in Russia and Ukraine are starting to seep into the continent, and at this rate, I won’t be surprised if we start seeing Shaheds flying all over the place,” he said. “It’s something we have to get ahead now and be more proactive rather than reactive.”
Keep it local: In keeping with Terra’s Pax Africana ethos, the company believes that capability should be homegrown.
“We are building sovereign defense infrastructure for the entire continent, and this is just the beginning—we have plans to build more factories across East, South, North [Africa] and build the infrastructure needed to protect resources and people,” Nwachuku said. “This goes back to the ideology of Terra and what we’re trying to institutionalize through the company with Pax Africana.”
“The only way Africa can have lasting peace is by uniting to build sovereign defense—not by importing from the West, China, Russia, or relying on foreign security architectures, but by controlling our own destiny by building the tools we need to protect ourselves,” he added. “That’s the only way this continent can effectively defeat terrorism, and I think this is the beginning of that vision playing out in a more concrete manner.”
And with its next factory in East Africa set to open “within the next 18 months,” Terra has no plans to stop in Ghana. Pax-2 could become Pax-10 real quick at this rate.