Terra Industries, a Nigerian defence technology company, has raised a further $18 million and closed its seed round at $52 million. That is about KES 6.7 billion.
A seed round is the first substantial money a startup raises from investors. This has been reported the round as the largest seed round in Africa. For scale, Partech’s 2025 Africa Tech Venture Capital Report counted $462 million raised across 311 seed rounds on the whole continent last year, an average of about $1.5 million per round. Terra’s round on its own is about 11% of that annual total. In April we covered Lua’s $5.8 million seed round, a big one by that measure.
What Terra builds
Nathan Nwachuku and Maxwell Maduka founded Terra in Abuja in 2024. The company makes autonomous security hardware: long-range and small drones, an interceptor drone built to knock down other drones, a solar-powered sentry tower with cameras and sensors, and an unmanned ground vehicle. All of it runs on ArtemisOS, Terra’s own software, which is meant to spot threats and coordinate a response without a human directing each machine.
The customers are governments and companies that run power plants, mines and pipelines in places where sabotage and armed groups are a problem. Terra says its systems already protect assets worth about $11 billion across several African countries.
Terra builds this hardware at Pax-1, a 15,000 square foot factory in Abuja. A second plant, Pax-2 in Ghana, is 34,000 square feet and due to open in the last quarter of 2026. Terra says it will be the largest drone factory in Africa once running, with a target of 50,000 aircraft a year by 2028. In February Terra also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Defence Industries Corporation of Nigeria, the state arms maker, for a local production joint venture.
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How the $52 million came together
The round arrived in three parts within eight months. In January Terra raised $11.75 million led by 8VC, the fund co-founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, with Lux Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Silent Ventures taking part. In February it added $22 million led by Lux Capital, with Resilience17 Capital, the fund started by Flutterwave chief executive Olugbenga Agboola, among the new investors.
The August $18 million came from returning investors 8VC, Silent Ventures, Nova Global, Belief Capital and SV Angel, plus two new names, Norleo Space Investments and angel investor Grant Gordon. Terra has not said who led this closing tranche or what the company is now worth.
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