Palmer Luckey partners with wolf billionaire Ben Lamm to launch $200 million Warhound

The U.S. military’s oldest autonomous system has a supply chain problem: Most of its dogs come from Europe. Less than half complete the training. And the Pentagon is bidding against foreign governments for those who remain.

Ben Lamm is the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based extinction-fighting company that announced in April 2025 that it had brought back the dire wolf, a predator that disappeared more than 10,000 years ago. What Colossal actually produced were three puppies, Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi. Its scientists took gray wolf cells, edited about 20 sites on 14 genes to match DNA recovered from ancient dire wolf remains, cloned the pups from those edited cells, and brought them to term by domestic dogs.

Lamm and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey believes the same tools, along with defense hardware, can solve this problem. Warhound, a defense technology startup created by the two men, comes out of stealth with a $200 million funding round, Fortune can exclusively report. David Spirk, a former Marine and former Pentagon chief data officer, is the CEO. The company is based in Texas.

Backers include 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.

“A dog is the oldest autonomous system in existence,” Lamm said in email responses to Fortunethe questions. “For thousands of years, dogs have been in danger before the people they protect.”

Import the good boys

The Army established the K-9 Corps in 1942. Today, according to the company, the War Department’s military working dog program has more than 2,200 dog teams, and more than 80 percent of U.S. military working dogs are purchased from Europe. Lamm cited a warning from the Senate Armed Services Committee that “due to the limited number of breeders overseas, as well as growing market demand, the cost…of purchasing military working dogs bred in Europe is skyrocketing.” He also cited the American Kennel Club’s assessment that “there is now a shortage of even low-quality foreign dogs available.”

The United States is “competing with governments of other countries” for the same animals, Lamm said, including China and Russia.

Losses after purchase are also costly. According to the company, less than half of the dogs purchased are deemed fit for service after about three years of acquisition and training. That means the United States needs to purchase and train about 200 dogs today to be able to raise 100 working animals later.

Biobank, clone, modify

Lamm outlined the plan in stages. Warhound will find the best dogs who have completed their training and biobank their genetic material. He will then clone these proven dogs, although Lamm said “training and environment will always influence performance.” At the same time, he will work on targeted genetic modifications.

The first group of dogs has already been biobanked and is being edited, Lamm said. He plans to deliver the first dogs in about two years. “Raising a dog takes the time it takes,” he said.

Warhound will eliminate known harmful variants linked to muscle degeneration and other hereditary diseases, so that “no dog enters service with genetic markers known to cause common career-ending illnesses.” Lamm said the company is still determining what other traits are “scientifically and responsibly exploitable.” Despite this, he said Warhound was “planning future genetic improvements to enhance their already outstanding performance.”

Anduril provides equipment including eye and hearing protection, body armor and integration with its Eagle Eye system, so that “dogs, handlers and autonomous systems work as one team”. The release announcing Warhound calls these “cybernetic augmentations.” Lamm said the dogs are not a step toward, or protection against, robot dogs. “Today, no machine matches a dog’s nose or its judgment in complex environments,” he said.

No contract, no price

Warhound does not have any signed customers yet, as Lamm said the company works with canine experts in the national security community. He also does not mention a price per dog, because “a young dog, a partially trained dog and a cloned dog in good health, trained and accompanied until retirement are very different things”.

Lamm said Warhound was discussing a “Canine-as-a-Service model,” in which the government would purchase a constant supply of trained dogs instead of individual animals. Software companies have been selling to the Pentagon on a subscription basis for years, and now the model is coming to the kennels.

Cloning of working dogs is not new. South Korea’s customs service deployed six cloned sniffer dogs in 2009. A decade later, Chinese scientists said they had cloned a top police dog, a Kunming wolfdog named Kunxun, to reduce training time, and talked about producing more. By November, six cloned K-9s had joined the Beijing police.

Nothing on the necessary scale exists yet, Lamm said, so the company plans to build kennels and training infrastructure nationwide step by step, “starting with private capital.” He hired what Lamm called “one of the best dog handlers to ever serve in the U.S. military” as director of canine operations. The American Humane Society will certify Warhound training programs and help reunite retired dogs with their former owners.

The Captain America Dog Program

The company says Lamm and Luckey came up with Warhound after a conversation at Peter Diamandis’ Moonshots Summit. Lamm said Luckey “loved our dire wolf announcement” and the two men talked about the military’s working dog programs: where the dogs come from, how many are disposed of and how much it costs to replace them.

“I’m passionate about origin stories, especially when we talk about the Captain America dog program,” Lamm said. In the comics, the super-soldier program took a skinny army reject and made him the best soldier in the service. Warhound targets unsuccessful dogs.

Afterwards, the two founders mostly took a step back. “Palmer and I don’t describe ourselves as co-founders,” Lamm said. “We developed the concept.” Luckey “doesn’t even have equity in the company,” he said. “I decided to be one of us to join the board and bring in Dave Spirk to do this,” Lamm added, saying he knew him well because Spirk had spent four years as an advisor to Colossal and had closely observed the de-extinction work.

Spirk spent eight years in the Marine Corps and nearly 20 more years as a government civilian in the intelligence and special operations community. He was the first chief data officer at U.S. Special Operations Command, then the War Department, and was one of the leaders of Project Maven, the Pentagon’s AI targeting program. He also served as Deputy Assistant Director of National Intelligence for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most recently, he was a senior advisor at Palantir, a position Lamm said Spirk calls his “Palantir degree.” For four years, he advised Lamm at Colossal and closely observed the de-extinction process.

“My goal is to build a team that can translate scientific advances into effective capabilities on the ground,” Spirk said in a statement.

The dire wolf’s launch sparked some criticism from scientists who said Colossal created genetically engineered gray wolves and not a resurrected species. Lamm rejected this criticism, while noting that it is not discussed here: “Our war dogs are genetically modified dogs, just like our dire wolves were genetically modified wolves. I suppose there is no way for anyone to debate the definition of a dog.”

Lamm rejected the idea of ​​forming some sort of combined Colossal-Anduril company. “LOL no, there is no Colossal-Anduril conglomerate,” he said. Colossal licenses technology to Warhound and has an economic interest in it. Shadowing companies from Colossal’s research is “an intentional part of our model,” Lamm said.

Luckey made a statement in the release: “Man’s best friend deserves man’s best technology. »

Generative AI was used for research assistance and/or transcription of this article. The journalist independently reported and verified the factual claims in this article, and a human editor reviewed it before publication.