Terra Industries closes a $52mn seed and opens its first office outside Africa

Terra Industries has added $18mn to close a $52mn seed round and will open its first office outside Africa in London, while keeping manufacturing in Ghana and Nigeria. The Nigerian company was founded in 2024 and says it is on track for more than $100mn in contract bookings this year.

Terra Industries has added $18mn to its seed round, closing it at $52mn, and is opening its first office outside Africa in London. Manufacturing stays in Ghana and Nigeria.

The founder is direct about what the office is for. The money “lets us scale that work and deepen our manufacturing base,” chief executive Nathan Nwachuku said, and “it also puts us in the rooms where global defense decisions are made.”

The company is two years old. Nwachuku founded it in 2024 with Maxwell Maduka, and it left stealth in January with $11.75mn led by 8VC, the firm started by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, before a $22mn extension led by Lux Capital in February.

Three tranches in eight months is fast for any seed-stage company. Nwachuku says the February round valued Terra in the nine-figure range.

Its commercial claims run ahead of that. The company says it is on track for more than $100mn in contract bookings by the end of the year with revenue in the eight figures, against roughly $2.5mn previously, most of it from industrial site security.

The product is hardware with a subscription attached. Autonomous drones, interceptor drones, sentry towers and unmanned ground vehicles run through ArtemisOS, Terra’s own software, and customers buy the equipment then pay continuing fees for monitoring and data processing.

Sovereignty is the pitch. Systems built for African heat, dust and patchy communications, manufactured on the continent, with the data staying there rather than routed through a foreign supplier.

Manufacturing is where the promise gets tested. A 34,000 square foot plant in Ghana, more than twice the size of the Abuja site, opens in the fourth quarter and is meant to reach 50,000 units a year by 2028, following a pattern set in Europe where Berlin’s Stark raised €500mn largely to build production capacity.

The scale gap is worth keeping in view. Terra’s entire seed is $52mn, against the $18bn valuation Helsing commands in Europe and the billions Anduril and Shield AI have raised in the US.

Which makes the choice of London telling. Germany takes 90% of Europe’s defence tech funding, so Terra is not coming here for money. It is coming for the institutions.