Covenant fired its missile into the Moroccan desert on 6 August, and soon afterward the world found out the company existed.

The shot came from an expeditionary site near Tan-Tan, and it was the first live fire ever conducted at the Africa Multidomain Training and Experimentation Center (AMTEC), a range the U.S. Army operates alongside Moroccan forces. Four weeks later, on 9 September, the company told its own report: $250 million raised across three rounds at a valuation above $1 billion from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8VC, Aleph, and Lightspeed. Covenant employs roughly 200 people across three countries, centered on a cruise missile called Anthem that has already logged more than 200 test flights.

Even more impressive: the company managed to operate in stealth for two years while accumulating real-world flight hours and building a substantial government order book.

The roster reads like a defense-tech casting call. Michael Kaufman, the chief executive, emerged from Thiel Capital. Co-founder Ofir Dayan spent years engineering missiles at American, Israeli, and German primes. Kathleen Hicks, who managed the Pentagon day-to-day as Deputy Secretary of Defense, serves as an adviser and lent her name to a launch statement tying Anthem to the functional principles of Replicator (perhaps a bit of a stretch).

The progress is real, and it has been exceptionally fast. Anthem’s maiden flight occurred in August 2025, followed by a live-fire slot at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 6 this past July. The company has secured approximately $150 million in booked orders, including an Army agreement for accelerated testing and roughly $70 million from the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office for a maritime variant. Its 105,000-square-foot facility in Grand Prairie, Texas, opened this month, targeting serial production in the first quarter of 2027 and a thousand missiles delivered in year one. Additional lines in Saxony and northern Israel are slated to follow shortly.

The operational progress is irrefutable. But the question remains: is this the right missile for the moment?