Terra Industries, a Nigerian defence-technology startup that integrates hardware and software by building drones and monitoring locations through proprietary software, has raised $11.75 million from U.S. investors. The round, the largest yet in Africa’s nascent defence-tech sector, sets Terra apart from a wave of smaller regional players and signals growing investor confidence in vertically integrated defence solutions on the continent.
The round was led by Silicon Valley venture firm 8VC, Valour Equity Partners, Lux Capital, SV Angel, Leblon Capital, Silent Ventures, Nova Global, and angel investors, including Micky Malka, who participated in the round. Alex Moore, a defence partner at 8VC and a board director at Palantir, a US public company that sells enterprise software platforms for data-led decision-making, joined Terra’s board in 2025, reportsTecabal. From its 15,000-square-foot facility in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, the startup, founded in 2023, formerly known as Terrahaptix, designs and manufactures unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), ground systems, and autonomous sentry towers used to secure power plants, mines, and other critical infrastructure across Africa for both government and commercial customers.
The raise and backing from investors in global defence tech startups like Anduril and Palantir vaults Terra into a small but growing cohort of African startups attempting something most have avoided: building advanced hardware and software systems locally, at scale, for security and defence markets long dominated by foreign suppliers. Terra says it has generated over $2.5 million in revenue since it was founded in 2023, and the new funding will expand manufacturing capacity at its Abuja facility and support software and business development hires in San Francisco and London. Defence tech is an unforgiving market globally; in Africa, its growth is stunted by small margins, lack of skilled expertise or qualified human capital, and thin hardware margins that can disappear as production scale increases.
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Software promises recurring revenue and defensibility if enterprise clients trust and adopt it. Terra blends the hardware-first approach pioneered by Anduril and the software-centric model associated with Palantir for its product philosophy. The startup mirrors Anduril in several ways, as it shares investors such as 8VC, Valour Equity Partners, and Lux Capital (8VC is led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale) and builds physical security infrastructure, including sentry towers similar to those Anduril deploys.
Like Palantir, however, Terra treats software as the centre of gravity. Its goal is to minimise human intervention at protected sites by automating detection, analysis, and response. Palantir’s long-term strategy has been to become a modern defence prime by owning the orchestration layer across complex systems, and Terra has adopted a similar thesis through ArtemisOS, its unified platform for large-scale security operations that ingests and analyses data in real time. Where Terra differentiates itself from Chinese and Israeli competitors bidding for African defence and security contracts is vertical integration.
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