Covenant

Covenant spent its first two years saying nothing in public. The company was founded in 2024 by Michael Kaufman, previously an investor at Thiel Capital, and stayed in stealth until 9 September 2026, when it opened a missile factory outside Dallas and announced that it had raised more than $250 million across three rounds at a valuation above $1 billion. The backers are the familiar Silicon Valley defence syndicate: Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux, 8VC, Aleph and Lightspeed. Kathleen Hicks, the former US deputy secretary of defense, sits on the advisory board. Abby Denburg is president and chief growth officer.

The product is a single missile called Anthem, and the pitch is arithmetic rather than performance. Anthem is a long-range cruise missile carrying a payload of more than 200 kilograms, assembled largely from commercial parts and priced in the mid six figures — expensive by the standards of a drone, cheap by the standards of a cruise missile. Covenant does not disclose its range. What it does disclose is the intended volume: 1,000 missiles in the first year of serial production, rising to a run rate of 5,000 a year during 2028.

That number is the argument. Denburg has put it plainly: the way to deter an adversary is to hold enough depth in the arsenal to sustain a conflict for weeks or months. Western deep-strike stockpiles are measured in the hundreds, and the war in Ukraine has been a running demonstration of how quickly precision inventories empty.

Anthem first flew in August 2025 and has since logged more than 200 test flights, including trials with the US Army under an other-transaction agreement and at least one test conducted in Morocco. Covenant reports roughly $150 million in booked orders, among them an award worth about $70 million from the US Navy’s Rapid Capabilities Office for a maritime version. Ground-attack and naval variants are both in development.

The manufacturing footprint is deliberately split across three countries: 105,000 square feet at Grand Prairie, Texas; 110,000 square feet in Saxony, in eastern Germany; and 32,000 square feet in northern Israel that combines research with production. Serial production begins in the first quarter of 2027 at all three.

Saxony is the part that matters most for Europe. Covenant says less than 5% of the bill of materials for its European-built Anthem originates outside the continent, with the stated goal of reaching zero — a direct answer to the export-licence and supply-chain dependencies that have complicated European purchases of American munitions. One European contract is signed, with the customer undisclosed, and reporting has suggested the German Bundeswehr is among the interested parties.