Nigerian cybersecurity startup Aeon has raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Terra Industries, as the African defense and critical-infrastructure company expands into digital security.
Terra Industries said on Sept. 18 that the round also attracted participation from Resilience17, the investment fund of Flutterwave co-founder and CEO Olugbenga Agboola, alongside other investors.
The investment follows a pilot between Terra and Aeon earlier this year and includes a commercial joint venture to deploy Aeon’s cybersecurity technology across military and commercial operations.
Lagos-based Aeon, founded by Samuel Ogbonyomi, Ben Eluan and Alex Idowu, is developing a cybersecurity platform designed to give organizations a single view of vulnerabilities across networks, code, cloud infrastructure and endpoints.
“Almost every operator we worked with had a dozen security tools and no single view of their exposure,” Ogbonyomi, Aeon’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.
Terra said the partnership will allow it to offer customers protection covering both physical infrastructure and the digital systems that operate it. The companies plan to jointly pursue contracts with governments and corporations across the Global South.
The deal comes as African organizations face growing cyber threats targeting financial institutions, government agencies and other critical infrastructure.
Terra cited an INTERPOL assessment that estimated cyber incidents across Africa had caused more than $3 billion in losses since 2019. The report also identified finance, healthcare, energy and government among sectors heavily targeted by cybercrime.
Terra, founded in 2024, develops security systems spanning air, land and maritime operations and uses its ArtemisOS software platform to manage large-scale security operations.
The company said the Aeon investment is part of its broader strategy to extend its protection of critical infrastructure from physical assets into the networks, software and data that underpin them.
“We see Aeon becoming the sovereign cyber defense layer for the Global South,” Terra Chief Executive Nathan Nwachuku said.
The companies said they intend to jointly execute government and corporate contracts, with Terra focused on physical security and Aeon on digital and cyber defense.