Warhound, a Texas startup backed by Anduril’s Palmer Luckey and Ben Lamm, a cofounder of the biotech company Colossal Biosciences, came out of stealth this week with $200 million in seed funding to breed genetically engineered working dogs for the U.S. military, law enforcement and emergency first responders.
The company said in a news release on Thursday that it intends to rebuild America’s domestic supply of working dogs, as Business Insider reported. Most of the military dogs now working in the United States come from European breeders, Warhound said, and many are eventually deemed unfit for service.
Mr. Lamm told Kate Knibbs of Wired that Warhound is gene-editing its first batch of dogs now, working from blood samples collected from “top-performing” American military, police and first responder dogs that it plans to clone. The breeds will be “mostly Belgian Malinois, some labs, and some shepherds,” he said, with the first puppies expected in early 2027.
“Man’s best friend deserves man’s best tech,” Mr. Luckey said of the venture. The first round of gene-editing will target health problems common to the breeds, like hip dysplasia. Later, Mr. Lamm said, he envisions “really interesting things,” such as adding olfactory receptor genes from wolves to sharpen the dogs’ senses. Colossal is best known for gene-edited wolves produced in what it calls its Dire Wolf De-Extinction Project.
Anduril’s part is hardware: eye and ear protection and what a news release called “advanced cybernetic Augments, software, and battlefield situational awareness.” Asked whether that meant cyborg dogs, Mr. Lamm said the current plan is equipment like “advanced body armor,” not computers embedded in the animals. “So no dogs with lasers?” Wired asked. “I can’t comment on what Anduril plans,” he said. “Dog safety and performance, and then helping continue helping to improve the human handler and dog bond, and working as a team — that is what the mission is.”
The seed round was backed by In-Q-Tel, Sequoia Capital, ARK Invest and Franklin Templeton. “Palmer, Ben and the Warhound team are exceptional,” Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia, said in the release. “Sequoia is proud to back them.”
David Spirk, a former Department of Defense chief data officer who most recently worked as a senior counselor at Palantir, will run the company as chief executive. He is a veteran of the Marine Corps. Neither founder will be involved day to day, though Mr. Lamm sits on the board. Mr. Luckey holds no equity in Warhound, according to Wired, and neither does Anduril. Colossal Biosciences has an ownership stake.
The company pledged commitments to animal welfare, announcing certification by the American Humane Society, the country’s first national animal welfare organization. Healthier, better-suited dogs, it said, would spare others unnecessary intensive training and make missions safer.
Mr. Lamm said the team had worked in secret for more than a year before going public. “Someone said, ‘So it’s like the Captain America dog program with the Ironman tech program on top of it,’” he told Wired.