Flutterwave CEO Joins Terra Industries in $1 Million Bet on Cybersecurity Startup Aeon
Terra Industries has led a $1 million seed funding round in Aeon, a Nigerian cybersecurity company developing what it describes as a sovereign cyber defense platform for Africa and the wider Global South.
Olugbenga Agboola, co-founder and chief executive of Flutterwave, also participated through his investment fund, Resilience17, alongside other investors, Terra said in a statement on Friday.
The deal marks Terra’s expansion into cyber defense as the company seeks to protect not only physical infrastructure but also the networks, software and data underpinning critical operations.
Aeon is building a suite of products designed to secure networks and data while identifying and addressing vulnerabilities across code, cloud infrastructure and endpoints. The platform aims to give security teams a consolidated view of their exposure and a single place from which 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, Aeon’s co-founder and chief executive. “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 founded Aeon with Ben Eluan and Alex Idowu.
The funding comes amid growing concern over the scale and sophistication of cyberattacks across Africa. According to figures cited from INTERPOL, cyber incidents have caused more than $3 billion in losses on the continent since 2019, with financial services, healthcare, energy and government institutions among the most heavily affected.
The report also found that cybercrime accounts for more than 30% of reported crime in West and East Africa. At the same time, terrorist groups, foreign adversaries and other hostile actors are increasingly using artificial intelligence to accelerate attacks against financial institutions and critical infrastructure.
Terra’s investment follows a successful pilot between the two companies earlier this year. They have since formed a commercial joint venture to deploy Aeon’s technology across military and commercial operations.
Under the partnership, Terra and Aeon will jointly pursue and execute contracts for governments and corporations across the Global South. Terra will focus on protecting physical assets, while Aeon will secure the digital infrastructure supporting them.
The arrangement is intended to give customers a single partnership through which they can protect both physical infrastructure and the underlying digital systems.
Terra said it sees Aeon becoming a sovereign cyber defense layer for financial institutions, large corporations, governments and militaries across the Global South. The fresh capital and commercial partnership will position the companies to pursue that ambition as cyber threats become more frequent, coordinated and technologically advanced.
