Terra Industries has led a $1 million pre-seed round in Aeon, a Nigerian cybersecurity company building sovereign cyber defense for Africa and the Global South. Olugbenga Agboola, co-founder and CEO of Flutterwave, also participated through his fund, Resilience17, alongside other investors.
Terra’s autonomous systems protect critical infrastructure that runs on networks, software, and data. For Terra, this makes cyber the next frontier of defense.
Cyberattacks in Africa are increasing and becoming more sophisticated. According to INTERPOL, cyber incidents across the continent have caused more than $3 billion in losses since 2019, with finance, healthcare, energy and government among the hardest-hit sectors. The same report found that cybercrime now accounts for more than 30 percent of all reported crime in West and East Africa. Meanwhile, hostile actors, including terrorist groups and foreign adversaries, are using advances in AI to increase the speed and scale of their operations against financial institutions and other critical infrastructure.
To address these threats, Aeon is building a cyber defense product suite that secures networks and data as well as monitors and remediates vulnerabilities across code, cloud and endpoints, giving security teams one view of their exposure and one place to act on it.
“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.”
– Samuel Ogbonyomi, Co-founder and Chief Executive officer, Aeon
Terra is excited to partner with Aeon and its investment follows a successful pilot earlier this year. The two companies have now formed a commercial joint venture to deploy Aeon’s cyber defense technology across military and commercial operations. Together, both companies will co-execute contracts for government and corporate organizations across the Global South, with Terra protecting physical assets and Aeon protecting digital assets. Customers working with Terra will be able to secure both their physical assets and the digital systems behind them through a single partnership.
“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. That is our goal, where Terra handles physical security, and Aeon handles digital and cyber security.”
– Nathan Nwachuku, Chief Executive Officer, Terra Industries
