After closing its $52 million seed round with a bumper $18 million in August, Nigeria’s Terra Industries is using some of that money to back its partners. Today, the company, which makes intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drones and unmanned ground vehicles, announced that it is leading a $1 million investment in Aeon, a cybersecurity business that, like Terra, is based out of Nigeria and focuses on customers across Africa and the Global South.
A Terra spokesperson confirmed that the company is forming a go-to-market joint venture with Aeon to present a more complete offering to customers: Terra addressing physical security, and Aeon for cybersecurity.
“We see Aeon becoming the sovereign cyber defense layer for the Global South, where financial institutions, large corporations, governments and militaries run their cyber operations on Aeon’s infrastructure,” said Nathan Nwachuku, chief executive officer of Terra Industries, in a statement. “That is our goal, where Terra handles physical security, and Aeon handles digital and cyber security.”
Resilience17, a fund started by Olugbenga Agboola (co-founder and CEO of one of Nigeria’s bigger tech startups, Flutterwave), is also taking part in the $1 million investment, alongside other un-named investors.
Aeon, like Terra, has emerged at a time when both government and commercial entities (industrial and otherwise) around the world are looking to modernise their security to be more responsive to the threats of today.
The pitch from companies like Terra and Aeon is that, because they are themselves based in the Global South, they are building modern products that are also more attuned to the challenges their customers face — specific threats in areas like border security, international and domestic terrorism, corruption, and now cybercrime.
Terra cites Interpol data that estimates that organisations and individuals across sectors that include finance, healthcare, energy and government have seen more than $3 billion in cybercrime losses in Africa since 2019. As with other parts of the world, AI has added a new perniciousness and velocity to the mix. And Aeon added that in a pilot it ran with Terra earlier this year, security fragmentation at the end-user level was especially bad.
“Almost every operator we worked with had a dozen security tools and no single view of their exposure,” said Samuel Ogbonyomi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Aeon, in a statement. “Attackers move across all of those systems at once. We built Aeon so a bank or a grid operator can see and fix its whole attack surface from one place.”
In Nigeria, the two also lean on being “sovereign” choices — local and thus less subject to the controls and whims of other governments. However, both companies have ambitions outside of Nigeria, so it’s unclear how that message of sovereignty and national resilience would play out elsewhere. And in theory they will face local competitors elsewhere, since technological and defence sovereignty have been big themes around the world.
Terra investing in a smaller business is also part of another current playing out in the world of defence: consolidation.
Larger companies are taking investments in smaller ones — sometimes even buying them outright — with a view to eventually rolling up multiple offerings to improve their economies of scale.
As the industry continues to mature, and the profusion of startups struggles to scale and raise growth rounds, there are bound to be more of these tie-ups.
Interestingly, Aeon is already tied up, in a sense.
It was actually started as part of Pipeops, a TechStars alum that focuses on cloud and infrastructure management that was co-founded by Ogbonyomi (he is described as the co-founder of Aeon with Ben Eluan and Alex Idowu). As of right now, Aeon is still a division of Pipeops.
A Terra spokesperson confirmed that its investment is only going towards the Aeon part of the business. There are no plans right now to spin it out from its parent company, much less for anyone to buy Aeon. It sounds like Pipeops, Aeon and Terra are all at early enough stages that the founders will play this aspect by ear.
