Defense startup Kela raises $60 million, reaches $100 million in first-year funding

Less than a year after emerging from stealth, Israeli defense-tech startup Kela Technologies has secured an additional $60 million in funding, bringing its total raised to $100 million since its founding in July 2024. The round was backed entirely by Kela’s existing investors—Sequoia Ventures, Lux Capital, and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA—underscoring their continued confidence in the company’s mission to modernize military infrastructure through adaptable, open software.

Kela’s rapid fundraising trajectory—an $11 million Seed round, a $28 million Series A, and now this latest infusion—places it among the most heavily capitalized early-stage defense startups. The company has declined to comment on the new raise.

Kela, which was selected last month as Calcalist’s sixth most promising startup for 2025, develops an open and modular software platform designed to assist Western militaries integrate emerging commercial technologies—such as AI models, advanced sensors, and edge computing devices—into existing military systems without the delays or constraints of traditional defense procurement cycles. It is, in effect, a battlefield operating system aimed at unifying fragmented defense tech stacks.

The platform ingests and processes real-time data from multiple sources and presents it in a unified command interface, giving military decision-creaters centralized control over connected assets. The company currently employs 25 people.

Kela’s founders include Hamutal Meridor, a graduate of Unit 8200, who previously managed Palantir’s Israeli operations—a company that develops combat management systems and has garnered significant interest since its IPO on Wall Street. In recent years, she was a partner at the Vintage investment fund. Kela’s CEO is Alon Dror, a graduate of the Talpiot program who served for about a decade in the defense sector, first as tank commander and later in roles at the Directorate of Defence Research & Development where he was awarded the Israel Defense Prize. Other co-founders include Jason Manne, an aeronautical engineer with a decade of experience in weapons development in the Israeli Air Force and the Innotifyigence Corps’ elite Technology Unit (Unit 81), and Omer Bar-Ilan, an experienced engineer and serial entrepreneur who previously led the algorithms team at Rafael.

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