Palmer Luckey, founder of the American defense tech giant Anduril, visited Israel earlier this year and reportedly singled out Kela as a target for a possible acquisition. According to information published by Globes, he explored buying the young company, but its founders rejected the idea. Kela did not comment. The founders say they are aiming instead to build an independent company that becomes a major global defense player.
Kela was founded in July 2024 by Alon Dror, a Israel Defense Prize winner and former senior official in the Directorate of Defense Research and Development, Hamutal Meridor, former president of Palantir Israel and a venture investor, VP of development Omer Bar-Ilan, and VP of product Jason Manni. The company has positioned itself in a market long dominated by established defense giants. Its main product is an open-architecture command-and-control system designed to connect sensors, drones, radars, intelligence systems, and weapons from different suppliers into one platform.
The startup says it wants to be the “fourth prime” of Israel’s defense industry, a reference to the major contractors that run strategic projects for governments and militaries. In closed conversations, the founders compare its approach to Android, an open platform on which different players can build and integrate capabilities more easily than in closed systems. Their inspiration came partly from Anduril, which grew from a small border-security company into one of the world’s fastest-growing defense firms in less than a decade.
Investors appear to be buying into the ambition. In less than two years, Kela raised about $300 million, including a $200 million round at a $1.2 billion valuation led by Stripes and D1. Other backers include Bill Ackman, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Sequoia, Lux Capital, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm. Kela says it generated about $20 million in revenue over the past year and secured at least $50 million in contracts, while growing to roughly 150 employees, opening a factory in southern Israel, and expanding from a handful of positions to dozens of deployment sites along Israel’s borders.
Kela now mainly works with Israel’s defense establishment, but it is already considering expansion into the U.S. market. It has signed an agreement with the American company Starling to integrate autonomous aircraft into its system and is seeking to add more sensors, drones, and collection technologies. The company still faces the usual barriers of defense procurement, slow sales cycles, and powerful incumbents such as Elbit, Rafael, and Israel Aerospace Industries, but its rapid growth and international investor interest have made it one of Israel’s most talked-about defense tech startups.
