Warhound exits stealth with $200M to genetically engineer working dogs for US military

Warhound, a new company from Colossal Biosciences' Ben Lamm with Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey acting as a partner, emerged from stealth on Thursday with $200 million in funding. According to TechCrunch, investors in the round include In-Q-Tel, Sequoia and 8VC, and it values the startup at $1.2 billion. The company's plan is to genetically engineer dogs for the U.S. military, law enforcement and emergency response teams, and to equip those animals with Anduril-built hardware.

A foreign-dependent supply of working dogs

Warhound's launch materials frame the problem as one of both supply and quality. The company says more than 80% of the working dogs used by the U.S. military come from Europe, and that fewer than half of them are fit for service. The result, as TechCrunch reports, is a shrinking pipeline of animals for tasks that are dangerous for humans or difficult for machines, such as bomb detection and search operations, alongside growing U.S. reliance on foreign breeders.

Lamm told TechCrunch he met Luckey about a year ago at a conference, where the Anduril co-founder raised the idea of doing more for America's military working dogs. Looking into it, Lamm found that many dogs fail out of training because of genetic predispositions toward poor eyesight, cancer, hip dysplasia or muscle atrophy.

Editing the top working breeds

Warhound's answer is to point Colossal's technology at the two breeds that dominate working-dog programs, the Belgian Malinois and the German Shepherd. According to Lamm, the team has taken cell lines from top-performing animals of those breeds and placed them in a biobank. It will then edit the genes, adding those linked to better performance in health, longevity, speed and agility, and even sharpened olfactory sensing for detection work, while removing the ones tied to disease. Lamm describes the outcome as essentially a new type of dog.

Colossal is best known for its de-extinction work on animals like the dodo and the mammoth, and has used AI to assist with gene cloning and the identification and reproduction of animal genes. Another Colossal-owned company, Viagen, will partner with Warhound on cloning the dogs; Lamm said Viagen's technology has a high success rate and is already used in Colossal's program for protecting endangered species.

Anduril gear layered on top

Anduril's contribution is hardware and software rather than biology. The defense company will supply enhancements such as protective vests and eye goggles intended to improve situational awareness and coordination between dogs and their handlers. Lamm's example is a bulletproof vest fitted with data sensors that feed information back to handlers so they can better understand what is unfolding in the field.

Lamm stressed that Anduril's additions sit on the dog rather than in it, and argued that making the animals safer, healthier and higher-performing will also do a better job of protecting their human handlers. Luckey holds no equity in Warhound, Lamm told TechCrunch. Colossal does own equity and licenses its technology to the new company.

Births expected early next year

The first batch of dogs is about to be cloned and incubated, with births expected early next year and, ideally, entry into service within two years. Pricing has not been determined, but Warhound expects to sell to first responders, the Department of Defense, military service groups and police forces. Lamm said the company has briefed many government groups about the business, though the TechCrunch report does not describe any formal approvals to date.

On the question of civilian safety, Lamm said each dog will be trained like any other military working dog and managed by whoever purchases it. Warhound added that it is working under the guidance of the American Humane Society to certify its training program, and it hopes that retired animals will enter the Society's Military Working Dog Reunification Program, which finds homes for retired military dogs.

Why it matters

Warhound is a concrete sign that the tooling Colossal built for de-extinction, including its AI-assisted gene identification and cloning pipeline, can be aimed at commercial and defense markets rather than conservation alone. It also targets a real supply-chain vulnerability: the U.S. military's dependence on European breeders for most of its working dogs. The venture deepens the growing overlap between biotech and defense tech, bringing Sequoia, 8VC and In-Q-Tel into a bet on engineered animals. How agencies and regulators respond to genetically edited dogs in policing and military roles, and whether the two-year path to service holds, will be the first real tests of the idea.