Terra Industries leads $1m round in Aeon to build Africa’s cyber defence layer

Aeon, a Nigerian cybersecurity startup building a platform to help high-trust organisations protect critical digital infrastructure, has raised $1 million in a pre-seed round led by defence-tech startup Terra Industries.

Resilience 17, the venture fund founded by Flutterwave co-founder and chief executive officer Olugbenga Agboola, Kaleo, DFS Labs, Ajim Capital, and Seedstars also participated in the funding round.

Aeon will use the funding to develop its cybersecurity products, expand business development, and turn existing pilots with financial services and cloud infrastructure companies into commercial deployments.

The raise comes as African businesses and governments face a growing cyber threat landscape. INTERPOL estimated that cyber incidents across the continent caused more than $3 billion in financial losses between 2019 and 2025. In its 2026 assessment, the organisation said artificial intelligence (AI) is now linked to 55% of reported cybercrimes in Africa.

“Almost every operator we worked with had a dozen security tools and no single view of their exposure,” Samuel Ogbonyomi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Aeon, said in a statement. “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.”

Ogbonyomi, Ben Eluan, and Alex Idowu began building Aeon in February 2026 through PipeOps, a cloud infrastructure management platform. Ogbonyomi described PipeOps as the parent entity and Aeon as a PipeOps product. Aeon is building what it describes as a cyber defence and compliance platform for high-trust organisations in commercial banking and finance, energy, oil and gas, and mobility sectors.

“We’re selling to high-trust organisations; it’s very important that we’re able to partner with highly networked individuals that ultimately have access to decision-makers across various industries,” Ogbonyomi told TechCabal.

Aeon offers two product suites: Aeon Console, a web-based platform that consolidates core security operations, including risk detection, vulnerability management, policy enforcement, response, and evidence gathering, and Aeon Edge, which sits within a customer’s network, giving security teams visibility into connected devices and allowing them to isolate compromised devices.

Aeon’s business model is primarily based on annual licencing. Its Console is modular and comes in three tiers, allowing customers to select the security functions they need rather than paying for the entire platform.

The investment also gives Aeon a commercial relationship with Terra, which closed a $52 million seed round in August. The two companies plan to form a commercial joint venture that will allow them to pursue some of Terra’s corporate and government contracts together, with Terra handling physical security and Aeon providing cybersecurity.

“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,” said Nathan Nwachuku, chief executive officer of Terra Industries. “That is our goal, where Terra handles physical security, and Aeon handles digital and cyber security.”

The joint venture arrangement divides responsibility between the two companies. Terra will handle the physical security component of a contract, and Aeon will secure the customer’s digital assets. Customers will sign the contract with Terra, and where it includes a cybersecurity component, Terra can extend that contract to Aeon, Ogbonyomi said.

On September 4, Terra announced $2 million in contracts to deploy 20 Sentry towers and four Iroko drones across lithium mining sites operated by two companies in Nigeria. Ten days later, it announced a separate $1 million contract with Anka Metals to provide security for its Jema’a Resource Project in Kaduna.

Aeon did not say whether it would be involved in either contract, but Ogbonyomi told TechCabal that the company is assessing some of Terra’s contracts for potential fit.

“We’re already looking at a couple of contracts between now and the end of the fourth quarter, and are hoping to close them in due time,” he said.

Ogbonyomi told TechCabal that the Terra deal grew out of an existing relationship between the two companies. Before Aeon began working with Terra on the cybersecurity product, the PipeOps team had spent roughly two years managing some of Terra’s internal infrastructure. That work gave the two companies a basis for exploring how their capabilities could fit together. Aeon said both companies began a pilot earlier in the year.

Aeon operates a cybersecurity market where global security vendors, including Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Check Point, and African companies, such as Kenya’s Serianu and Morocco’s Nucleon Security, offer specialised products and services.

For Aeon, the longer-term goal is to build a cybersecurity infrastructure layer for critical organisations across the Global South.

“We’ve been building in stealth for quite some time, but sequel to this announcement, you’re going to be seeing more of this,” Ogbonyomi said. “We’re going to be driving a lot of thought leadership and educating the region on some of the most critical issues we should be paying attention to.”

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