Cathedral, a stealth New York City-based military cybersecurity startup founded by four former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) engineers, has raised $160 million at a $1.4 billion post-money valuation in a round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. The financing, first reported Wednesday, arrives just weeks after the company launched.
Four DOGE alumni, $1.4B valuation weeks after launch
Cathedral was co-founded by Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, Marko Elez and Jack Stein — all former DOGE staffers with backgrounds spanning federal agencies and leading technology firms. The team is building specialized AI systems engineered to autonomously scale U.S. military cyber operations, map foreign digital vulnerabilities and harden critical domestic network infrastructure. According to sources cited by Reuters and Bloomberg, both Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia took board seats as part of the deal.
Tactical neural networks for offensive and defensive cyber
The company said it will use the capital to build out the architecture of its "tactical neural networks," expand its deep-learning and offensive cyber-engineering divisions and accelerate automated threat-detection deployments across secure federal defense infrastructures. Its systems leverage advanced generative models to simulate automated network penetrations while maintaining low-latency, compliance-hardened sovereign data guardrails suitable for defense-sector operations — an explicit response to Chinese cyber pressure. The company is also weighing a data-center acquisition or partnership to secure dedicated AI compute for sensitive workloads.
Defense-tech capital keeps compounding
Cathedral's round underscores how fast defense-tech capital is compounding: startups in the sector had already raised $14.6 billion by the end of June, blowing past 2025's full-year record. Its investors have led back-to-back defense and national-security bets, including Anduril and Archer Aviation's Thunder autonomous tiltrotor and SDA's $1.75B Golden Dome satellite tracking award. Cathedral now joins Neo, ReliaQuest and the newly stood-up White House AI cybersecurity coordination group in a fast-consolidating market for AI-driven national security tooling.
Reporting based on coverage from Reuters, Bloomberg, FinSMEs, US News and executivebiz.com.