A pair of Gen Z founders have raised $11.75 million to create a new type of African defense firm.
Terra Industries, a firm based out of Abuja, came out of stealth with backing from 8VC to craft and make responsible weapons systems that safeguard critical infrastructure across the continent — but remain under African control and intelligence.
Venture capital heavyweights Valor Equity Partners, Lux Capital, SV Angel and Nova Global join African backers Tofino Capital, Kaleo Ventures and DFS Lab in the round. Terra had raised $800,000 in pre-seed before and says interest from investors kicked into high gear after the company publicly demonstrated its technology.
Why This Raise Matters For African Security
Security analysts have long cautioned that insurgent, bandit and sabotage threats to African infrastructure — power plants, pipelines, mines and seaports — represent a persistent menace to the continent. More recently, Global Terrorism Index reports (by the Institute for Economics and Peace) find sub-Saharan Africa accounting for a proportion of global terrorism-related fatalities running at about 47%, with several hot spots in the Sahel. The price isn’t just human; it’s also one that stifles investment and slows regional growth.
Terra’s wager is that the bottleneck isn’t firepower. It’s sovereign intelligence: who gathers the data, who melds it together, and who makes decisions about what to do. Many African nations continue to depend on foreign surveillance, satellite tasking and analytics pipelines. Terra’s mission is to re-create what that stack looks like on local terms, pairing sensors with software that African agencies are in control of.
A Young Team With Deep Military DNA at Terra
Terra was co-founded by CEO Nwachuku and CTO Maxwell Maduka, 24, a former Nigerian Navy engineer who started a drone company as a teenager. Forty percent of its engineers who are Nigerian military veterans provide the team with “frontline familiarity” to the operational environment they are designing for, according to the company.
Governance and guidance go defense-native also. 8VC partner Alex Moore, who focuses on defense investments, is joining the board, and Air Vice Marshal Ayo Jolasinmi of the Nigerian Air Force has come on as an advisor. The combination of youth and uniformed experience is rare in an industry that often drives start-ups away with long procurement cycles.
Self-Driving Vehicles Designed For African Soil
At the heart of Terra’s stack is ArtemisOS, proprietary software that takes in information from sensors in the air, on the ground and at sea, processes it in real time and routes alerts to response teams. The goal, the company says, is to “geofence” important assets — say a hydropower plant or a mining corridor — and keep constant watch over the approaches that matter most.
In the skies, Terra is developing both long-range and short-range drones capable of operating in austere environments with minimal maintenance. On the ground, it uses fixed monitoring towers and mobile ground robots for patrol and inspection. Maritime instruments are being developed to track offshore rigs and subsea pipelines, where it has in the past been difficult to gain a clear view of the Gulf of Guinea — an area where piracy and coastal crime have been recorded by the International Maritime Bureau despite a downward trajectory in incidents that has come as countries work together on security.
Early Traction And A Defense Prime Ambition
Terra claims to have reported more than $2.5 million in commercial revenue and that its systems are currently protecting assets totaling about $11 billion. Current customers are now concentrated in Nigeria, and at a minimum, two hydropower plants and several smaller mining sites where catching an incursion early is the difference between a mere disruption and a catastrophic shutdown.
The company’s first federal contract has also been secured, though the details were not released. Terra makes money through system sales and annual fees for data processing and storage, a classic hardware-plus-software model that aligns incentives to keep sensors online and analytics improving.
In the long term, Terra aims to be Africa’s first homegrown “defense prime,” a vertically integrated supplier that can both design and sustain complex systems on a large scale. Toward that end, the new capital will be used to accelerate the build-out of four factories across the continent and expand AI and software teams. Terra intends to open software hubs in San Francisco and London, but maintain manufacturing within Africa to deepen supply-chain roots and bring high-skill jobs.
What To Watch Next For Terra and African Security
Scaling defense tech in Africa will pit Terra against challenges on multiple fronts: export controls and compliance, plugging into government command systems, data governance, and the simple logistics of maintaining fleets across wide swaths of varied terrain. But the demand drivers are clear. Whether via resilience of the grid or resource security, governments and operators are under pressure to enhance their situational awareness and ability to respond in a timely manner without giving up sovereignty.
If Terra is able to marry robust field hardware with an intelligence layer that local agencies trust and control, it could signal a shift in how the continent buys and deploys defense technology. The raise is a bet that the next frontier of critical infrastructure protection in Africa will be developed — and owned — by Africans themselves.
