American billionaire Palmer Luckey helps launch $200 million military dog-cloning startup

American billionaire Palmer Luckey, the founder of defense contractor Anduril Industries, has teamed up with fellow billionaire Ben Lamm of Colossal Biosciences to launch Warhound, a startup that plans to clone and genetically engineer dogs for the U.S. military, police and emergency services.

The Texas-based company came out of stealth on Thursday with $200 million in seed funding at a valuation of $1.2 billion. Its backers include In-Q-Tel, the venture capital firm funded by the CIA, along with Sequoia Capital, ARK Invest, Franklin Templeton and 8VC.

"Man's best friend deserves man's best tech," Luckey said in a statement announcing the company.

Lamm, the chief executive of Colossal, said he and Luckey first discussed the idea at Peter Diamandis' Moonshots Summit. Luckey is a partner in the venture but holds no equity in it, and neither does Anduril, Lamm said. Colossal owns a stake and licenses its genetics and cloning technology to Warhound.

David Spirk, a Marine Corps veteran who served as the Defense Department's first chief data officer and later worked as a senior counselor at Palantir Technologies, will run the company as chief executive.

Fixing a supply problem

Warhound says more than 80% of the dogs used by the U.S. military's 2,200-plus working dog teams come from Europe. Fewer than half of the dogs bought make it through about three years of training, which means the Pentagon has to source roughly 200 dogs to field 100. Many wash out because of inherited problems such as poor eyesight, hip dysplasia, muscle wasting and cancer risk.

The company has built a bank of cell lines from proven working dogs, starting with Belgian Malinois and German Shepherds, two breeds widely used for bomb detection, patrol and search work. It plans to clone those animals first, then use gene editing to remove traits that end training careers and, later, to strengthen speed, agility and sense of smell. Lamm said future work could draw on wolf genes linked to scent detection.

The first cloned puppies are being carried now and are due in early 2027, with the aim of putting dogs into service within about two years. ViaGen Pets & Equine, a Texas animal-cloning company that Colossal bought in November 2025, is handling the cloning.

"Every day, we ask dogs to put their lives on the line to protect ours," Lamm said. "They detect explosives, protect our troops, and run toward dangers that most people are trained to run away from."

Anduril will supply equipment worn by the dogs, including eye and ear protection, sensor-fitted vests and its Eagle Eye system, to give handlers better awareness in the field. Lamm said the gear goes on top of the dog and not in it, and that the animals will not carry implanted computers.

Warhound has not set prices or announced contracts. Its target buyers are the Defense Department, other military groups, police forces and first responders, and Lamm said the company has already briefed a number of government agencies. American Humane, the animal welfare group, will certify its training programs and help reunite retired dogs with their former handlers.

Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the work needs careful ethical review and meaningful oversight. Rules on gene-edited animals in the U.S. remain unsettled.

Two founders worth $11.6 billion

Luckey, 34, built the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset as a teenager and sold Oculus VR to Facebook in 2014 for about $2 billion in cash and stock. He started Anduril in 2017 after leaving Facebook. The company, which makes autonomous drones, surveillance towers and weapons systems, raised $5 billion in May at a $61 billion valuation, double the $30.5 billion it was valued at in June 2025. Luckey is worth an estimated $5.9 billion.

Lamm, 44, co-founded Colossal in Dallas in 2021 with Harvard geneticist George Church. The company is trying to bring back the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger, and in April 2025 it unveiled three gene-edited gray wolf pups that it called dire wolves, an animal that died out more than 10,000 years ago. Colossal is valued at more than $10 billion, and Lamm is worth an estimated $5.7 billion. He has founded or co-founded five other companies, all of which were sold.

"Palmer, Ben and the Warhound team are exceptional. Sequoia is proud to back them," said Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital.