Covenant

Defense Tech · Aerospace · Manufacturing

Funding

Covenant emerges from stealth as $1B+ unicorn after $250M raise

Its mass-producible cruise missile targets a fraction of the Tomahawk's cost as Western stockpiles run thin.

• Covenant, a Washington, D.C.-based defense startup, emerged from stealth on Sept. 9, 2026, unveiling its Anthem cruise missile alongside $250 million raised across three funding rounds led by Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8VC, Aleph and Lightspeed.
• Founded in 2024 by CEO Michael Kaufman, Covenant builds long-range, heavy-payload cruise missiles engineered to be mass-produced at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems such as RTX's Tomahawk.
• The company has already booked about $150 million in orders and plans plants in Dallas, Germany and Israel with a combined target output of 12,000 missiles a year.
• Covenant's 105,000-square-foot Dallas-area factory aims to produce 1,000 Anthem missiles in its first year, beginning serial production in Q1 2027 and scaling to 5,000 units annually.
• The funding valued Covenant at more than $1 billion, according to Calcalistech, marking the company's first crossing into unicorn territory.
• Anthem is designed to fill the gap between cheap tactical drones and expensive legacy cruise missiles, as Western missile stockpiles have been strained by the wars in Ukraine and Iran.
• Covenant's stealth exit reflects a broader venture-capital push to challenge defense primes like RTX and Lockheed with software-driven, mass-producible weapons, a bet accelerated by real-world stockpile shortages in Ukraine and Iran.