Step by steady step, Nigerian drone and robotics start-up Terra Industries (formerly Terrahaptix), is making solid footprints on the African drone building space, as it works towards achieving its goal of becoming the biggest drone maker on the continent.
Operating from its 15,000-square-foot (1,394-square-meter) space on the outskirts of Abuja, the company’s founders claim their complex has the capacity to build 30,000 drone each year, something that has never been done on the continent.
Founded in 2024 by two young Nigerians, Maxwell Maduka (23) and 22-year-old Nathan Nwachuku, Terra Industries sees itself as making the ultimate solution to the attacks on critical infrastructure at various sites across the continent: drones and other autonomous security systems powered by artificial intelligence that can detect threats and help protect the continent’s critical industries such as energy, mining, telecoms and agriculture.
Those drones include long-range drones built for surveillance missions; quadcopters for first response and data collection, as well as small self-driving vehicles for ground surveillance.
Last May, Terra Industries won a $1,2million contract with private security firm NetHawk Solutions to deploy AI-powered drones and surveillance towers at two hydroelectric power plants in Nigeria. The system will help the company detect and monitor potential threats, such as bandits.
CEO Nwachuku says the company already exports its drones to eight African countries and Canada, protecting an estimated $11 billion-worth of assets – power plants, lithium mines, gold mines and oil refineries.
“We have scaled with very little resources,” says Nwachuku.
“Terra today has actually raised less than $600,000 and… we are currently at $1.9 million in revenue.”
Nwachuku’s goal has always been to help industrialise Africa, and for that to happen, he reckons the continent must solve the common denominator, which is insecurity.
One of the key initial focuses was developing and building software and hardware in-house. AI-powered software called ArtemisOS is the brain of the system and has won the company international attention.
“It collects all the surveillance data from all these different systems,” Nwachuku said.
“It analyses this data looking for threats in real time. And once spotted, it alerts the necessary response teams, whether it is security agencies or in-house response teams.”
He believes that the in-house approach has set the company apart from competitors. While some sensors and cameras are imported from nations including South Korea, the software, the airframes, the propellers, and the lithium-ion battery packs are manufactured in-house, something that provides much safer data security.
Terra Industries has also partnered with local cloud platform PipeOps rather than global firms, so it can maintain data sovereignty and render support to related African businesses.
Staying local also brings costs down, as manufacturing in Africa is cheaper than America or Europe, as is hiring talent. These savings are passed on to clients, with initial hardware purchases up to 55 percent cheaper than international competitors, according to Nwachuku.
Beyond the initial cost, clients must pay for the software annually. Without the software subscription, the Terra hardware ceases to function, but clients can integrate the Terra software into hardware supplied by other providers.