5 minBusiness
Palmer Luckey and Ben Lamm Launch Warhound With $200 Million to Clone and Gene-Edit Military Dogs
Warhound, a Texas defense startup founded by Anduril's Palmer Luckey and Colossal Biosciences' Ben Lamm, is emerging from stealth with a $200 million seed round to biobank, clone and gene-edit America's military working dogs, aiming to end reliance on European breeders.
A new defense technology company founded by Anduril's Palmer Luckey and Colossal Biosciences chief executive Ben Lamm is emerging from stealth with $200 million in seed funding to breed, clone and genetically edit the U.S. military's working dogs, the company said. The startup, Warhound, is based in Texas and is led by David Spirk, a former Marine and the Pentagon's former chief data officer.
The venture targets a long-standing supply problem for the U.S. military's oldest autonomous system. According to Warhound, more than 80% of American military working dogs are purchased from Europe, and fewer than half of the dogs bought are judged fit for service after a roughly three-year acquisition and training pipeline. That means the U.S. must buy and train about 200 dogs today to field 100 working animals later.
Lamm cited a Senate Armed Services Committee warning that the cost of procuring whelped military working dogs from Europe is skyrocketing because of the finite number of breeders overseas and rising market demand. He also pointed to an American Kennel Club assessment that there is now a shortage of even mediocre-quality foreign dogs available. The U.S., he said, is competing against other governments, including China and Russia, for the same animals.
Warhound's plan unfolds in stages. The company will identify top dogs that have completed training and biobank their genetic material, then clone those proven animals. Alongside cloning, it will pursue targeted gene edits, screening out known harmful variants tied to muscle degeneration and other inherited diseases so that no dog enters service carrying genetic markers known to cause common career-ending conditions. Lamm said the first group of dogs has already been biobanked and is being edited now, with first deliveries expected in about two years.
«A dog is the oldest autonomous system there is,» Lamm said. «For thousands of years, dogs have gone into danger ahead of the people they protect.» He added that training and environment will always influence performance, and that the company is still determining which other traits are scientifically and responsibly actionable, while planning future genetic enhancements to improve the dogs' already exceptional performance.
Anduril is supplying equipment including eye and ear protection, body armor and integration with its Eagle Eye system so that dogs, handlers and autonomous systems operate as one team. The company's release describes these as cybernetic Augments. Lamm said the dogs are not a step toward robot dogs, nor a hedge against them, because no machine today matches a dog's nose or its judgment in complex environments.
The $200 million seed round includes backing from In-Q-Tel, Sequoia Capital, ARK Invest, Franklin Templeton, 8VC, USIT, Bob Nelsen, Breyer Capital, CAZ Investments, Neogenesis, Builders VC and Lux Capital, among others. Warhound has no signed customers yet and is not quoting a price per dog, Lamm said, because a young dog, a partially trained dog and a cloned dog of proven health with training and support through retirement are very different things.
The company is discussing a Canine-as-a-Service model in which the government would buy a steady supply of trained dogs rather than individual animals, an approach familiar from software subscriptions sold to the Pentagon. Cloning working dogs is not new: South Korea's customs service deployed six cloned sniffer dogs in 2009, and Chinese scientists later cloned a top police dog and placed cloned K-9s with Beijing police. Lamm said nothing at the scale needed exists yet, so Warhound plans to build national-scale kennel and training infrastructure step by step, starting with private capital.
Warhound has hired what Lamm called one of the top dog handlers ever to serve in the U.S. military as director of canine operations. The American Humane Society will certify the company's training programs and help reunite retired dogs with their former handlers. The company says Lamm and Luckey conceived the venture after a conversation at Peter Diamandis' Moonshots Summit, where Luckey expressed enthusiasm for Colossal's dire wolf announcement and the two began discussing where military dogs come from and how many wash out.
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