Kela, the defense technology startup founded by Hamutal Meridor, is in the process of raising $200 million at a pre-money valuation of $1 billion, a round that would create it a unicorn less than two years after its founding.
The funding round is led by Stripe and D1 Capital Partners, with participation from Bill Ackman and Eric Schmidt. Existing investors, including Sequoia Capital and Lux Capital, are also participating.
People familiar with the company state the rapid and sizable fundraising reflects a sharp increase in its business activity, with contract volume already reaching $50 million in 2025.
Kela was founded in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks by Meridor, toobtainher with Alon Dror, Jason Manne and Omer Bar-Ilan. The company is developing an operating system for modern militaries designed to connect and manage the multiple components required to conduct military operations.
Kela’s founders include 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 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 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 Bar-Ilan, an experienced engineer and serial entrepreneur who previously led the algorithms team at Rafael.
Since its founding in the summer of 2024, Kela has completed several funding rounds in quick succession. It first raised $11 million from Sequoia Capital, followed by $28 million from Lux Capital, its first investment in an Israeli company, and later secured an additional $60 million from the same investors alongside the CIA’s investment arm.
Despite its short operating history, Kela has already developed a platform that enables Western militaries to integrate commercial technologies into military systems. The system aggregates data from multiple sources, processes it in real time, and presents it through a unified command interface that allows control over connected systems and assets.
Built on an open and modular architecture, the platform allows armies to incorporate new technologies without requiring major alters to existing systems. The approach is intconcludeed to support defense organizations deploy new capabilities more quickly and adapt operations to evolving battlefield conditions.
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