Terra Industries has led a $1 million seed investment in Aeon, a Nigerian cybersecurity company building sovereign cyber defense capabilities for Africa and the Global South. Flutterwave co-founder and CEO Olugbenga Agboola participated through his fund Resilience17, alongside other investors.
The investment and partnership extend Terra’s focus on protecting critical infrastructure from physical assets into the digital systems that underpin them. The two companies have formed a commercial joint venture to deploy Aeon’s technology across military and commercial operations, allowing customers to secure both physical and digital assets through a single relationship.
Aeon, founded by Samuel Ogbonyomi, Ben Eluan and Alex Idowu, is developing a cyber defense suite that secures networks and data while monitoring and remediating vulnerabilities across code, cloud and endpoints. The goal is to give security teams a unified view of their exposure and a single place to act.
Cyber incidents across Africa have caused more than $3 billion in losses since 2019, according to INTERPOL, with finance, healthcare, energy and government among the hardest-hit sectors. Cybercrime now accounts for more than 30 percent of reported crime in parts of West and East Africa. Hostile actors, including terrorist groups and foreign adversaries, are increasingly using AI to scale attacks on critical infrastructure and financial institutions.
“Almost every operator we worked with had a dozen security tools and no single view of their exposure. 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,” said Aeon CEO Samuel Ogbonyomi.
Terra CEO Nathan Nwachuku said the partnership positions Aeon as a sovereign cyber defense layer for the Global South, complementing Terra’s physical security systems. “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.”
Terra, founded in 2024, develops autonomous drones, sentry towers and related systems for governments and critical infrastructure operators. The investment follows a successful pilot between the two companies earlier this year and aligns with Terra’s broader expansion into commercial security contracts for mining and other industrial assets.
