Aeon, a Nigerian company building the cybersecurity backbone for critical infrastructure across Africa and the Global South, has raised $1 million in seed funding led by Terra Industries. Resilience 17, Kaleo, DFS Labs, Ajim Capital, and Seedstars also participated.
Led by Samuel Ogbonyomi, Ben Eluan, and Alex Idowu, Aeon grew out of years of building and managing cloud infrastructure for businesses through PipeOps, their cloud infrastructure management platform. That experience gave the team a firsthand view of how companies approach security and compliance and exposed a critical gap in the tools available to protect modern infrastructure.
While cybersecurity tools already exist, attacks on African institutions are growing more costly and sophisticated. INTERPOL estimates that cyber incidents across Africa have caused more than $3 billion in losses since 2019, with finance, healthcare, energy and government among the hardest-hit sectors. Attackers, including non-state actors and foreign adversaries, are also becoming more capable. They are using advances in AI to increase the speed and scale of attacks on financial institutions and other critical infrastructure. The tools meant to stop them are fragmented and lack the data and intelligence needed to defend across multiple attack surfaces at once.
“Almost every operator we worked with had a dozen security tools and no single view of their exposure. 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,” said Samuel Ogbonyomi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Aeon.
To address these threats, Aeon is building a cyber defence product suite made up of Aeon Edge and Aeon Console. Aeon Edge is a hardware device that secures networks and data at the perimeter. Aeon Console is an AI-powered cyber defence and compliance portal that monitors and remediates vulnerabilities across code, cloud and endpoints. Together, they give security teams a single view of their exposure and a single place to act on it.
Aeon is focused on critical industries across the Global South, starting with Nigeria. Its solutions are built for the security challenges, institutional frameworks and regulations on the ground in each market.
Aeon has commenced pilots with businesses offering financial services and cloud infrastructure in Nigeria. Aeon will use the seed funding to improve its products, expand its engineering team and convert these pilots into commercial deployments across Nigeria’s financial sector, cloud providers and critical infrastructure operators.
Earlier this year, Aeon also began a pilot with Terra Industries. Following the pilot’s success, the two companies have formed a commercial joint venture to co-execute contracts for corporate and government organisations across the Global South, with Terra protecting physical assets and Aeon protecting digital assets.
“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. That is our goal: Terra handles physical security, and Aeon handles digital and cyber security,” said Nathan Nwachuku, chief executive officer of Terra Industries.
