Terra Industries closes $52M seed round to build defense infrastructure for the Global South

African defense tech company Terra Industries on Monday announced an additional $18 million in funding, bringing its seed round to $52 million. Investors in the round include Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, Silent Ventures, and Nova Global. 

Since its launch back in 2024, Terra has become one of the hottest names in the African defense tech space, with plans to build autonomous systems and other infrastructure like drones and mine-detecting combat vehicles. The company says it’s on track to book $100 million in contracts — including at least one federal contract — and generate revenue in the tens of millions of dollars by the year’s end. 

Earlier this year, Terra announced back-to-back funding rounds of $11.75 million and $22 million, respectively. 8VC is also a backer of U.S. defense heavyweight Anduril, which is said to be in talks to raise funding at a $100 billion valuation, as well as Shield AI. 

Terra said its competition right now is any defense company that has won government contracts, especially suppliers from Turkey, China, and the West.

As TechCrunch previously reported, although terrorism remains one of Africa’s biggest threats, many of the countries in the continent depend on the West, Russia or China for security intelligence. Countries in this region often work with numerous international contractors, meaning their defense supply chains are fragmented and therefore easily destabilized.

Terra says it wants to solve that by becoming the biggest player in the ecosystem for equipping countries with military and critical defense infrastructure. 

The startup will use the fresh capital to expand manufacturing across the Global South, open a London office, hire more, and accelerate product deployment. It also hopes to open an office in San Francisco and build a presence in Washington, D.C. to better access capital and U.S. partnerships.