Aeon has secured $1 million in seed funding to expand its cybersecurity infrastructure and help organisations across Africa and the Global South better protect their digital systems. The round was led by Terra Industries, marking a significant step in the Nigerian company’s plans to build sovereign cyber defense capabilities for critical sectors.
Olugbenga Agboola, co-founder and CEO of Flutterwave, also participated through his fund, Resilience17, alongside other investors.
The investment comes as cyber threats across Africa continue to increase in scale and sophistication. According to INTERPOL, cyber incidents across the continent have caused more than $3 billion in losses since 2019. Finance, healthcare, energy and government are among the sectors most affected.
The same report found that cybercrime now accounts for more than 30 percent of reported crime in West and East Africa. Hostile actors, including terrorist groups and foreign adversaries, are also using advances in artificial intelligence to increase the speed and scale of attacks against financial institutions and critical infrastructure.
Expanding Digital Defense
Aeon is building a cyber defense product suite designed to help organisations secure their networks and data while identifying and addressing vulnerabilities across code, cloud systems and endpoints.
The platform is intended to give security teams a single view of their exposure and one place to respond to threats.
“Almost every operator we worked with had a dozen security tools and no single view of their exposure,” said Samuel Ogbonyomi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Aeon, who founded the company with Ben Eluan and Alex Idowu.
“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.
The approach is aimed at simplifying cybersecurity operations for organisations managing complex digital environments. It also supports Aeon’s wider goal of building cyber defense infrastructure designed for the needs of Africa and other markets in the Global South.
Terra and Aeon Form Commercial Joint Venture
Terra Industries’ investment follows a successful pilot with Aeon earlier this year. The companies have now formed a commercial joint venture to deploy Aeon’s cyber defense technology across military and commercial operations.
Under the partnership, Terra and Aeon will jointly execute contracts for government and corporate organisations across the Global South. Terra will focus on protecting physical assets, while Aeon will protect the digital systems that support them.
The partnership will allow Terra’s customers to address both physical and digital security through a single relationship.
“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,” he added.
Founded in 2024, Terra Industries is a multi-domain systems and data intelligence company serving sectors including energy, mineral resources, urban infrastructure, maritime assets, border security and counterterrorism operations.
The company develops integrated air, land and maritime systems powered by ArtemisOS, its unified software platform for large-scale security operations.
Aeon’s products, Aeon Edge and Aeon Console, are designed to secure networks, code, cloud systems and endpoints for financial institutions, cloud service providers and critical infrastructure operators.
