Entrepreneurs invest $200,000 for startup robots factory in Nigeria
…To end insecurity challenges for farmers
By Matthew Denis
An Entrepreneur and Co-founder of TerraHaptix Robot Factory, Mr. Nathan Nwachukwu has disclosed that they have invested a total of $200,000 in establishing a local robotic factory in Nigeria to provide wide range services to African countries and beyond.
The entrepreneur made the disclosure to journalists during the launch of their operations in Abuja on Saturday.
He said, “Unlike most other startups that need millions of dollars to start, this company so far has raised less than $200,000 and all this capital was compiled by key members of the company by the Board.
“We haven’t gotten any venture funding or institutional funding as everything you are seeing here the products, factory, staff are done by key members. Though, we are in talk with institutional investors but yet to reach a conclusion.”
He stressed that their systems will assist in providing service to proffer solutions for farmers’ insecurity challenges, as they can always monitor their farm activities with these gadgets.
Mr. Nwachukwu who is a co-founder of the factory with Maxwell Maduka about Seven months ago said, “Our mission today is to accelerate automation in emerging markets as TerraHaptix is an Nigerian robotics startup that designs, manufactures, and sells autonomous drones.
“The company develops everything in-house including the airframe, flight computers, firmware, powertrain, and the flight OS.
“We are dedicated to building a low-cost robotic system that cannot just automate robotics industries in Africa but can also help other markets around the world as we don’t intend to build here but also export the systems.”
According to him, TerraHaptix serves as the first hardware company coming out of Nigeria.
He said, “For years now we have been hearing of the Fintech Eflex but a lot of people have not really placed a Big bet on hardwares and manufacturing Status.
“Today, we want to show everyone that you can build hardwares at skills and succeed at it locally and export it to other countries.”
Mr. Nwachukwu revealed that one of their systems called Kalou Centric Tower is a customer product used for export to Ghana.
He said, “Since our commencement most of our markets have been coming beyond Nigeria and Africa though we are still serving some of our customers locally here too.”
In terms of accessing raw materials he said, “We have tried to be as vertically integrated as we can from the Acha UAV system, FA to the GCS and other major components. Things like the imaging equipment have to be brought in from Asia.
“We are having a 70 percent raw materials produced locally and 30 percent imported for components ratio.”
On collaboration with the government the founder stressed that there are no spelt out plans but they have been having discussions.
“Right now we don’t have any formal collaboration with the government but we have been discussing it. When we started we thought we were going to be Defense so we actually have a sort of collaboration with DICO but we exited defence just two weeks before the launch of this factory because we don’t want blood on our hands with our systems.
“We have a kind of self sufficiency where we do not necessarily want a sort of government aid to help us succeed but we can partner the government to accelerate.”
In terms of revenue derivation, the entrepreneur stressed that in the last seven months since they began, they made almost $1 million and over $15 million in Basic Sign Contracts but yet to get payment which has come from major customers in the oil and Gas industry, Mining, Construction industries.
“We expect to end the year with about $2.5million in revenue for our first operational year and most of this amount will come from exportation,” he noted.
