Terra Industries leads $1 million pre-seed round in cybersecurity startup Aeon

Terra Industries has led a $1 million pre-seed investment in Aeon, a Nigerian startup building a cyberdefence platform for high-trust organisations in the Global South.

Resilience17, the early-stage investment firm founded by Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola, also participated in the round alongside DFS Labs, Kaleo Ventures, Seedstars, and Ajim Capital.

Founded by Samuel Ogbonyomi, Ben Eluan, and Alex Idowu, Aeon was born out of the founders’ experience building cloud infrastructure solutions at PipeOps. PipeOps is now focused on building cyberdefence and sovereignty solutions for critical infrastructure across the Global South.

Aeon’s relationship with lead investor Terra Industries began as a working partnership before the hardware company, which has raised $51.7 million so far in 2026, decided to invest in the startup. The two companies also share several investors, including DFS Labs, Kaleo Ventures, and Resilience17.

“We were in charge of managing some parts of their infrastructure, and ultimately when we decided to start building the solution, they were naturally the first people we could see as partners,” Ogbonyomi told Condia.

Aeon’s product suite includes Aeon Edge, a hardware device that secures networks and data at the perimeter, and Aeon Console, an AI-powered cyberdefence and compliance portal that monitors and remediates vulnerabilities across code, cloud, and endpoints.

While Terra Industries is primarily a hardware company, Ogbonyomi says the scope of its work on Aeon Edge is limited, although Aeon may occasionally leverage Terra’s expertise to improve the product.

“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,” Ogbonyomi said in a statement seen by Condia.

Aeon says it has begun pilots with financial institutions and cloud infrastructure companies in Nigeria as it works to demonstrate the platform’s value. It also conducted a pilot with Terra Industries earlier this year. Following its success, the companies entered into a joint venture to co-execute contracts for corporate and government organisations across the Global South.

“We see Aeon becoming the sovereign cyber defence 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,” said Nathan Nwachuku, CEO of Terra Industries.

Ogbonyomi sees Africa’s cybersecurity market as a significant opportunity, arguing that companies today often rely on managed services or piece together multiple security tools to meet their needs.

Aeon is positioning itself as a more holistic alternative, designed to protect organisations whether their infrastructure is hosted on-premises, in the cloud, or across both environments.