- Terra Industries has added $18 million to its seed round, bringing the total to $52 million.
- The Nigerian defence-tech startup is opening its first office outside Africa, in London.
- A 34,000 sq ft Ghana factory, due to open in the fourth quarter of 2026, is central to its next phase.
Terra Industries has added $18 million to its seed round, pushing the total raised at the seed stage to $52 million. The Nigerian defence-tech startup is using the capital to open its first office outside Africa, in London, while keeping manufacturing centred in Ghana and Nigeria.
The $18 million tranche was joined by returning investors 8VC, Silent Ventures, Nova Global, Belief Capital and SV Angel, alongside new investor Norleo Space Investments and angel investor Grant Gordon.
Defence spending across Africa is rising as governments respond to terrorism, organised crime, and threats to infrastructure that international suppliers were never designed to protect. Much of that infrastructure, roughly $11 billion worth of it, by Terra’s own account, still relies on imported security systems built for different terrain and threat profiles.
Terra’s vision is that locally designed, locally manufactured alternatives will win out over the long term, and investors have moved quickly to back that bet: three funding tranches in eight months is an unusually fast cadence for a seed-stage company anywhere, let alone in African defence tech.
Two young founders, an unusually fast seed round
Terra was founded in 2024 by Nathan Nwachuku and Maxwell Maduka. The company, formerly known as Terrahaptix, emerged from stealth in January 2026 with an $11.75 million round led by 8VC, the venture firm founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
Nwachuku has said his goal is to build “Africa’s first defence prime, to build autonomous defence systems and other systems to protect our critical infrastructure and resources from armed attacks,” when the company came out of stealth in January.
The startup combines hardware and software into a single platform. Its product line includes autonomous drones, interceptor drones, sentry towers, and unmanned ground vehicles, all connected through ArtemisOS, Terra’s proprietary software for threat detection, mission planning, and coordinated response across land, air and maritime environments. Governments and infrastructure operators pay for the hardware, then pay Terra an ongoing fee for data processing and monitoring.
Terra’s clearest point of difference from Western and Chinese suppliers is that its systems are built and that the data is controlled locally. Anduril and Shield AI have raised far more capital globally, and Skydio and Saronic remain the dominant names in drone and autonomous-vessel manufacturing in the United States, but none of them build primarily for African terrain or keep production and data on the continent.
Terra’s pitch to governments is sovereignty: systems designed for heat, dust, and communications constraints specific to Africa, built and controlled locally rather than licensed from abroad.
Manufacturing is the next test
The raise lands amid a broader shift in defence-tech investing toward companies that can prove they can manufacture at scale, not just prototype.
Tech Funding News has covered Mach Industries’ $300 million raise at a $1.8 billion valuation, where manufacturing capacity anchored the company’s pitch, and Berlin-based Stark’s 500 million euro round, more than 80% of which went toward production despite the company’s Virtus drones failing to hit a single target across four live-fire trials months earlier.
Manufacturing scale, in other words, is about buying investor confidence even when the underlying hardware hasn’t fully proven itself yet.
Terra’s own manufacturing buildout, a 34,000 sq ft factory in Accra, Ghana, more than double the size of its existing plant in Abuja, Nigeria, follows the same logic. The company says the Ghana site will become the continent’s largest drone factory once operational in the fourth quarter of 2026, reaching a capacity of 50,000 units a year by 2028.
The company plans to use the funding to expand manufacturing capacity, accelerate deployments, and hire across engineering, operations, and business development, including the new London team.
Why London specifically
There is also a growing European ecosystem forming around autonomous defence that Terra’s London office now plugs into. TFN has covered Occam’s €3 million raise for autonomous drone operations built for GPS-denied battlefields and Arondite’s $12 million round to connect autonomous defence systems through AI.
Both are, notably, London-based — the same city Terra is now envisioning will give it access to defence institutions and capital that Lagos and Abuja cannot.
