Warhound Exits Stealth With $200 Million to Clone US Military Dogs

By Grace Kim

Warhound, a defense tech startup conceived by Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, is coming out of stealth with a $200 million seed round. Fortune first reported the deal. The company will clone, gene-edit and armor American military working dogs — and pull a supply chain that currently runs through Europe back to the United States.

The problem Warhound is attacking is expensive and concrete. The U.S. military's working dog program runs more than 2,200 dog teams today, according to the company, but more than 80% of U.S. military working dogs are bought from Europe. Lamm cited a Senate Armed Services Committee warning that "due to the finite number of breeders overseas, as well as rising market demand, the cost… to procure whelped military working dogs from Europe is skyrocketing." He also quoted the American Kennel Club's assessment that "there is now a shortage of even mediocre quality foreign dogs available."

The washout rate compounds the cost. Fewer than half of the dogs the U.S. buys are judged fit for service after a roughly three-year acquisition and training pipeline, the company says. That means the Pentagon must buy and train about 200 dogs today to field 100 working animals later.

And Washington isn't shopping alone. The U.S. is "competing against other country governments" for the same animals, Lamm said — China and Russia among them.

Who is building Warhound?

David Spirk, a former Marine and the Pentagon's former chief data officer, is CEO. The company is based in Texas. Spirk spent eight years in the Marine Corps and close to 20 more as a government civilian in the intelligence community and special operations. He was the first chief data officer of U.S. Special Operations Command and then of the Department of War, a plank holder on Project Maven — the Pentagon's AI targeting program — and deputy associate director of national intelligence for Afghanistan and Pakistan. More recently he was a senior counselor at Palantir, a stint Lamm said Spirk calls his "Palantir diploma."

"My focus is building a team that can turn scientific advances into capabilities that work in the field," Spirk said in a statement.

The backer list includes 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.

Lamm, for context, runs Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas de-extinction company that announced in April 2025 it had brought back the dire wolf. What Colossal actually produced was three pups — Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi — by taking gray wolf cells, editing about 20 sites across 14 genes to match DNA from ancient dire wolf remains, cloning the pups and having domestic dogs carry them to term.

How does the biology work?

Lamm laid out the plan in stages. Warhound will biobank genetic material from top dogs that have finished training, then clone those proven animals — though he conceded that "training and environment will always influence performance." In parallel, it will pursue targeted gene edits. The first group of dogs has already been biobanked and is being edited now, and Lamm expects first deliveries in about two years. "Breeding and raising a dog takes the time it takes," he said.

The company will screen out 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 Warhound is still deciding which other traits are "scientifically and responsibly actionable," but added it is "planning future genetic enhancements to improve their already exceptional performance."

Anduril supplies the hardware: 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 launch release calls these "cybernetic Augments." Lamm rejected the framing that the dogs are a step toward — or a hedge against — robot dogs. "No machine today matches a dog's nose or its judgment in complex environments," he said.

What's the business model?

Warhound has no signed customers yet and isn't quoting a per-dog price, 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," Lamm said. He confirmed the company is discussing a "Canine-as-a-Service model," in which the government buys a steady supply of trained dogs rather than individual animals — the Pentagon's familiar software-subscription playbook, applied to the kennel.

Cloning working dogs isn't new. South Korea's customs service deployed six cloned sniffer dogs in 2009. A decade later, Chinese scientists cloned a top police dog — a Kunming wolfdog named Kunxun — to cut training time, and by that November six cloned K-9s had joined the Beijing police. But nothing exists at national scale, Lamm said, so Warhound plans to build kennel and training infrastructure step by step, "starting with private capital." It has hired what Lamm called "one of the top dog handlers ever to serve in the U.S. military" as director of canine operations, and the American Humane Society will certify its training programs and help reunite retired dogs with former handlers.

Lamm and Luckey hatched the idea at Peter Diamandis' Moonshots Summit, after Luckey "loved our dire wolf announcement." "I'm all about origin stories, especially when we're talking about the Captain America dog program," Lamm said — aiming at the dogs who don't make the cut. Both founders then stepped back. "Palmer and I don't describe ourselves as co-founders," Lamm said. "We developed the concept." Luckey "doesn't even own equity in the business," and Lamm joined the board and tapped Spirk, who had spent four years advising Colossal.

On the skeptics who called the dire wolves gene-edited gray wolves, Lamm was blunt: "Our warhounds are genetically modified dogs just like our dire wolves were genetically modified wolves. I assume there is no way for anyone to debate the definition of a dog." He also shut down any conglomerate theory — "LOL no there is no Colossal – Anduril conglomerate" — noting Colossal licenses technology to Warhound and holds an economic interest, part of an intentional spinout model.

Luckey's own statement in the release was shorter: "Man's best friend deserves man's best tech."

With $200 million in private capital, proven cloning tools and a Pentagon procurement problem worth billions, Warhound's two-year countdown to first deliveries starts now.