Terra Industries raises $11.75M to build Africa's first modern defense prime with drones and surveillance tech

lightning round.

There you go.

The Lambda lightning round.

That is real. The cloud is real. It is lightning in the Ultra Dome

from Terra coming in. Nathan is in the re waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV pan. Nathan, how are you doing?

Very good.

Thanks so much for taking the time to hop on the shirt. It almost look Oh, I thought it was a jacket for a second. Uh, very very cool.

Looks great. Uh, please introduce yourself. Introduce the company.

Yeah. Awesome. I am Nathan, um, co-founder and CEO of of Terra Industries. I'm a 22-y old software engineer and essentially we're building Africa's first modern the first try. Wow. And uh what got you into the industry? What were you doing before? How did you recognize this opportunity?

Um well, I I began my journey in tech when I was 15. Um had an accident that made me lose my lose my sight

success. [laughter] And uh at some point during the pandemic um I was 17 at at at this time I went on to launch my first you know startup that was solving like the the education crisis especially in emerging markets. Um and that allowed me to to understand that uh basically if we truly want to help industrialize the continent if we truly want to help push Africa towards like a massive industrial growth we have to solve much more foundational infrastructural problems. And I start to think around you know what is the single problem that we could solve today that could basically cut across every every industry. And that's you know what that common um denominator was was was was security. So sometime in 2024 I and my co-founder Maxa we we um decided that we want to start um terror industries to essentially give Africa the technological edge needed to um to uh um defend it itself its resources and its critical infrastructure.

Sure. How are you thinking about the first products? Uh there's a lot of uh defense technology companies that focus on drones or maritime or ground autonomy. there's a whole bunch of different products. It's I imagine you want to build them all eventually, but uh do you have a a foothold that you want to dominate in first?

Yeah. So for us, we're thinking quite multi-dommain. Um the the question for us is how can you protect these critical um assets from all sort of threats and right now know this evolving threats are coming from the air, from land and from sea. So in the aerial domain we have our longrange and short range drones. In the ground domain we have our sentry towers and soon in the maritime domain we'll be deploying some USVs that will be that'll be carrying out large scale maritime surveillance. All these different systems are being powered by one unified software platform that carries out data intelligence you know um um collecting all these data from all the different systems synthesizing that data and um um allowing the security agencies to identify and track threats in real time. So this is basically what we're trying to to do. You could almost think of it as kind of like the same strategy that Palanteer did in the west, you know, but the major difference is we also have to build out the hardware um um infrastructure that is collecting this data because there's there's no like previous um surveillance infrastructure that allows us to basically plug in our our software platform.

How does the procurement uh process work in Nigeria? How is there a program of record concept? Are there grants for smaller projects? Uh what what's the goal?

You guys already have a a couple million dollars in revenue. Sounds like that's growing quickly.

Yeah. How did that come together?

Yeah. When we first started um the company, we focused mostly on privately owned infrastructure assets, you know, lower barrier to entry, shorter sales cycle that allowed us to rapidly scale. Um so um mostly owned by like corporations and billionaires but over time we're able to build an impressive enough portfolio that allowed us to then sell to governments and uh and militaries. So

the the defense contracting model in Africa is like fundamentally very different from how it's done in the west. In the west is quite bureaucratic. It could take you one to two years before you get to like a program of of record. In Africa is quite very network-based you know and also very solution first. So essentially no one is is is really expecting you to write um um dozens of of of proposals and you know come to office and present them like powerpoints they're expecting you already have a solution to their problem. So in a very funny way, the Android approach of like taking R&D head on and having the the actual products to then go carry out live demos on the field works perfectly for the model of defense contracting on the continent and that has allowed us to scale very rapidly and that is something that most western companies don't understand you know western Chinese you know they come here with papers [laughter]

and uh they end up basically you know um wasting a lot of time um and not really being very productive.

Yeah.

Do you guys have a dual use opportunity? I can imagine people that that have uh various assets on the continent that could be oil and gas they want to I can imagine maybe your sentry towers are applicable drones etc. Uh even for non-kinetic solutions just surveillance uh from a security standpoint what kind of opportunities are you guys pursuing there?

Yeah, we don't do kinetic at all. So we are entirely focused on building surveillance.

Sure.

Because you know essentially the Nigerian army today has enough firepower to you know um basically destroy any terrorist group in West Africa. The the the problem with insecurity in Africa today is not the lack of firepower. It's the lack of intelligence, the lack of visibility. you know um understanding where these attacks are are coming from how is being perpetuated you know looking at previous attacks to to to um sort of like part out a pattern recognition that can help you predict future attacks this is the major issue so what terror is trying to do is build that intelligence and surveillance layer across the continent not necessarily you know um uh building kinetics you know we don't ever intend to get into kinetics I think it's the um the the sort struggle and war that African governments are fighting against terror does not require us getting into kinetics. You know what the religious negative and that kind of takes me into like my second point of like data sovereignity. Um because um today when we announced around there was a lot of you know viral tweets of how Palanteer is now in Africa. Um we are sellouts and stuff like that. Um so I want just make it very clear you know

um

this is an investment from yes a Palanteer co-founder um and several other visas but this is a technology that is entirely owned by Nigerians is built by us is managed by us operated by us we have no direct relationship with Palanteer we don't share any data with Palanteer so that's just something to just very clear that's a good point to make uh obviously as you scale a business, you're going to need to hire a lot of people. Uh what where are the great talent pools in Nigeria or Africa broadly? What's the Stanford? What's the Waterlue? What's the Y Combinator? Uh where will you be sourcing candidates from?

Yeah. Um first off, you know, Nigerians are some of the smartest people you could ever meet. You know, very underrated talent base. Um there's there's already a lot of like software talent on the continent mostly because of that fintech boom of you know the

exactly empa wave so there's there's there's a lot of existing software talent and in terms of hardware you know there's there was basically an um a hidden um hardware base you know that have been working mostly with the military they have been doing a lot of side projects they have never been able to kind of commercialize their skills at scale And you know what we essentially went um um um um did was we we went to these communities and we hired the entire communities [laughter] you know um I love it

community acquisition

it's [laughter] great

you know so for us really in scaling talent is it goes beyond Nigeria because part of our strategy is we we want to build a decentralized manufacturing network you know so having

a factory in each sub region you know our manufacturing base now in Nigeria would serve West Africa.

Um in the next couple of months we'll be opening a factory in East Africa to serve the East African region. And the reason that we're doing this is you know first of all it's it's it's much easier in terms of supply chain and logistical networks. But second you know um the threats that are being faced in in each of these regions are actually quite different. you know in in in West Africa you have t mostly in like the Saharan you know very hot climates very desert climates um you're mostly deploying mostly aerial and ground systems but when you come to East Africa you know you have issues for example with mostly in the maritime you know with the Somalian pirates um where you would mostly have to deploy you know maritime systems so you you can't essentially have one centralized factory building for the continent you know Africa is too big for that. Too big, too complex. You have to basically use this decentralized manufacturing network. So each factory we open would tap the local base of the region it is located at.

Sure. Uh give us the information on the round. You raised some money. We want to hit the gong for you. How much did you raise?

11.75 million.

Congratulations.

There we go.

And thank you for taking the time to come chat with us here.

Yeah, great to meet you. I'm sure I'm sure you'll be back on very soon and congrats to the whole team on a very cool milestone and getting a great group of people involved. You got 8C of course, Valor Equity, Lux Capital, Wow,

SV Angel, Silent, Mickey,

Alex Moore. Let's go. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon.

Great hanging.

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