Founded 2024 by Israeli-American CEO Michael Kaufman, Covenant came out of stealth Sep 9 with more than $250M raised across three rounds (latest at ~$1.25B) from a16z, Founders Fund, Lux, 8VC, Lightspeed and Israel's Aleph. Its "Anthem" system is a heavy-payload (200kg+), long-range precision-strike missile built to be mass-produced at a fraction of legacy cost — 200+ test flights, ~$150M booked orders including a ~$70M US Navy maritime-variant contract, with production in Northern Israel, Germany and a new Dallas factory. New to the tracker; fills the under-represented defense/deep-tech slice (§13). (Weapons manufacturer — flagged, not editorialized; founder Israeli-American + Israel production, confidence Med.)
CTech →Cylake (co-founders Nir Zuk, founder of Palo Alto Networks; Wilson Xu; and chief architect Ehud "Udi" Shamir) added $245M via a convertible note on Sep 8, taking total funding to $290M (Lightspeed, Picture Capital, Redpoint). The platform is built for highly regulated organizations that can't use the public cloud — full data sovereignty, on-prem/private deployment — with a beta expected end-2026 and GA in 2027. Already tracked (was $45M seed, Mar 2026) — row updated.
SecurityWeek →Elad Schulman's Lasso Security raised a strategic $30M to scale Leap — a transformer-free guardrail that runs entirely on ordinary server CPUs with zero GPUs, aimed at securing enterprise LLM and AI-agent use. Lasso was on the CLAUDE.md §13 watchlist of agentic-AI/AI-cyber names to add; now tracked. New to the tracker.
VC Cafe →Two Series A rounds this week build out the enterprise-AI-agent stack: Euno (Sarah Levy) raised $23M to give AI agents the organizational knowledge they need to work reliably, while Cymphony (Shy Dekel) raised $25M to secure the access and actions of employees and AI agents. Both new to the tracker (Euno tagged AI; Cymphony security + AI).
VC Cafe →This week's disclosed rounds ran defense, cyber and enterprise AI, with no new Israeli biotech or digital-health financing inside the window. The ecosystem signal was the launch of the Israel National Biotech Innovation Center (INBI) on Sep 6 to shore up early-stage drug funding. Most-recent biotech rows remain QuantHealth ($45M, Aug 4) and Remepy ($36M, Aug 12); the dedicated biotech/medtech sweep stays queued (§13).
Times of Israel →The week broadened past AI/cyber: WINT Water Intelligence (Alon Geva) raised a $36M Series D for AI leak/water-waste detection in buildings (fills the §13 cleantech gap), and HydroSight (Tomer Adler) exited stealth with a $5M seed turning marine-survey data into seabed intelligence. Two exits: Bonfy.AI (Gidi Cohen, ex-Skybox) was acquired by Kiteworks, and identity/KYC firm Scanovate sold to Prytek for ~$50M (first phase). All four new to the tracker.
VC Cafe →