Warhound is emerging from stealth with a $200 million seed round, backed by investors including In-Q-Tel, Sequoia Capital, ARK Invest, Franklin Templeton, 8VC, and Lux Capital. The company is based in Texas and led by CEO David Spirk, a former Marine who served as the Pentagon’s first chief data officer.
The company’s pitch is straightforward: the U.S. military’s working dog supply chain is broken. More than 80 percent of military dogs are bought from Europe, fewer than half complete their training, and the Pentagon is forced to compete with foreign governments, including China and Russia, for the limited supply.
Warhound’s solution draws on the biotech toolkit Lamm used at Colossal to produce the dire wolf pups in 2025. The company will biobank proven military dogs, clone them, and perform targeted gene edits to eliminate known harmful variants tied to muscle degeneration and other inherited diseases. The first dogs are already being edited, and Lamm expects to deliver the first animals 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.”
Lamm described the effort as a “Captain America dog program,” aiming to transform dogs that wash out of the current pipeline into elite performers. Anduril is contributing equipment including body armor, eye and ear protection, and integration with its Eagle Eye system to create what the company calls cybernetic Augments. Lamm stressed the dogs are not a hedge against robot dogs. “No machine today matches a dog’s nose or its judgment in complex environments,” he said.
The company does not yet have signed customers but has discussed a Canine-as-a-Service model where the government pays for a steady supply of trained, supported dogs rather than purchasing individual animals. The American Humane Society will certify Warhound’s training programs and assist in reuniting retired dogs with their former handlers.
Lamm said the concept emerged from a conversation with Luckey at Peter Diamandis’ Moonshots Summit. Luckey does not own equity in Warhound. Colossal licenses its technology to the startup and has an economic interest in it, consistent with Lamm’s model of spinning companies out of Colossal’s research.
“Spinning companies out of Colossal’s research is an intentional part of our model,” Lamm said. He dismissed the idea that the criticism of Colossal’s dire wolf project applies here. “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.”