Terrahaptix Builds Africa’s Largest Drone Factory in Ghana as JNIM and ISIS Drive Sahel Arms Race

Terrahaptix Inc., the Nigerian defense-tech startup also known as Terra Industries, will open a 34,000-square-foot drone factory in Accra, Ghana, by the end of June 2026. At full capacity, the plant targets 50,000 units annually by 2028, which would make it the largest drone manufacturing site on the African continent, the company confirmed in a statement first reported by Bloomberg on Monday.

The facility, named Pax-2, is Terra’s first manufacturing expansion outside Nigeria and more than doubles the footprint of its flagship 15,000-square-foot Pax-1 plant in Abuja. The build-out follows $34 million raised across two 2026 rounds: $11.75 million in January led by 8VC, the venture firm of Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and $22 million in February led by Lux Capital. DroneXL covered the January round when it closed. The expansion lands as al-Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates run a full drone war across the Sahel, and most African militaries lack the counter-drone capability to respond.

Pax-2 Targets 50,000 Drones Per Year With Three Aerial Platforms

Pax-2 will produce three aerial systems and create 120 engineering jobs in Accra. The Archer is a long-range VTOL platform built for surveillance and strike. The Iroko UAV, pictured in Bloomberg’s coverage being assembled at the Abuja site, is designed for rapid tactical deployment. The third system is new: Kama, an interceptor drone the company says can hit 300 km/h (186 mph), engineered specifically for counter-drone defense.

Kama matters because it plugs the exact capability gap the Institute for Security Studies has flagged in the region. Sahelian armies have stocked up on offensive Turkish platforms, including at least 17 Bayraktar TB2s operated by Mali and the more advanced Akinci flown by Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. What they lack is any reliable way to detect and neutralize the small, low-altitude commercial drones armed groups use to strike back.

JNIM Has Run at Least 89 Drone Operations Since 2023

The commercial drone threat in the Sahel is no longer theoretical. Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the al-Qaeda coalition operating across Mali and Burkina Faso, conducted at least 89 drone operations between 2023 and 2025, according to BBC reporting. In January 2026, Islamic State Sahel Province struck Niamey International Airport in Niger with suicide drones, according to ACLED analysis, the group’s first confirmed drone attack in the country.

Eleven African countries have now recorded drone attacks by non-state actors. Most of those platforms are cheap quadcopters retrofitted with improvised explosive devices, but the tactics are evolving fast. Nwachukwu told Bloomberg that fiber-optic control systems are now showing up in Sahel conflicts and rendering traditional radio-frequency defenses less effective. That’s the same technology that defined the FPV arms race in Ukraine, where spooled fiber tethers let operators bypass jamming entirely.

“We are now seeing tactics and technologies from conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe begin to appear in Africa,” Nwachukwu told Bloomberg.

Terra Borrows the Anduril and Palantir Software-Plus-Hardware Model

Terra sells its drones and sentry towers with its proprietary ArtemisOS flight and mission software on a recurring-fee basis, the same subscription-plus-hardware structure pioneered by U.S. defense primes Anduril and Palantir. The company says its systems already protect roughly $11 billion in assets across eight African countries, including hydropower plants, lithium mines, and oil facilities.

That customer base was built fast. In June 2025, Terra beat an Israeli consortium to win a $1.2 million contract to secure two Nigerian hydropower plants, a deal DroneXL covered when it closed. In February 2026, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with the Defence Industries Corporation of Nigeria (DICON), the state-run defense arm of the Nigerian Armed Forces, to create a joint venture for local assembly and training. The agreement was executed under the DICON Act 2023, which opened the corporation to public-private partnerships for the first time. Terra also brought on Nnamdi Chife, a counter-insurgency specialist, as Vice President of Military Relations.

Silicon Valley Defense Money Is Looking Past Ukraine

The investor list behind Terra reads like the cap table of every autonomous-defense company that has reshaped Pentagon procurement over the last decade. 8VC, Lux Capital, Valor Equity Partners, SV Angel, and Silent Ventures have all backed combinations of Anduril, SpaceX, and Palantir. Olugbenga Agboola, founder and CEO of Nigerian fintech Flutterwave, participated through his Resilience17 Capital vehicle. The thesis: what worked for Ukraine’s defense buildout transfers to Africa, where the customer base is fragmented but the threat environment is accelerating faster than any other theater outside active war zones.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ve been tracking Terra since that $1.2 million hydropower contract in June 2025, when a 22-year-old CEO outbid an Israeli defense consortium and almost nobody outside the sector noticed. What was a local-security story then is now one of the most consequential defense manufacturing plays on the continent, and the speed of it still surprises me. Two funding rounds closed in under six weeks. A factory moving from public announcement to live operations in roughly ten weeks. Most Western defense primes can’t move a PowerPoint that fast.

The parallel worth watching is Anduril’s Arsenal-1 in Ohio, which DroneXL covered when FURY production began last month. Both companies are designing for manufacturability first and performance second, both are running vertically integrated stacks where the software is the recurring revenue and the airframe is the loss-leader. The difference is geography. Anduril optimizes for the Pentagon. Terra optimizes for eleven African governments that have already been attacked by weaponized commercial drones and have no sovereign counter-drone industry to call.

The harder question sits with the Confederation of Sahel States. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have cut ties with ECOWAS, pivoted toward Turkish and Russian suppliers, and are buying drones in volume. If Terra lands one AES contract in the next 12 months, the homegrown-prime thesis is real. By the end of 2027, I expect Terra will have signed at least one of them. The math on local supply lines, political distance from NATO primes, and the Kama interceptor’s 300 km/h spec makes that outcome more likely than not.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.