Palmer Luckey teams with dire wolf billionaire Ben Lamm to launch $200 million Warhound, unleashing genetically engineered clone dogs of war

The Colossal and Anduril founders want to clone, gene-edit and armor America’s working dogs, and bring the supply chain home from Europe.

The U.S. military’s oldest autonomous system has a supply-chain problem: most of its dogs come from Europe. Fewer than half make it through training. And the Pentagon is bidding against foreign governments for the ones that are left.

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

Lamm and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey think the same tools, plus defense hardware, can fix that. Warhound, a defense tech startup the two came up with, is coming out of stealth with a $200 million seed round, Fortune can exclusively report. David Spirk, a former Marine and the Pentagon’s former chief data officer, is CEO. The company is based in Texas.

Lamm and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey think the same tools, plus defense hardware, can fix that. Warhound, a defense tech startup the two came up with, is coming out of stealth with a $200 million seed round, Fortune can exclusively report. David Spirk, a former Marine and the Pentagon’s former chief data officer, is CEO. The company is based in Texas.

The backers are 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 there is,” Lamm said in emailed responses to Fortune’s questions. “For thousands of years, dogs have gone into danger ahead of the people they protect.”

Importing the good boys

The Army set up the K-9 Corps in 1942. Today the Department of War’s Military Working Dog Program has more than 2,200 dog teams, according to the company, and 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........

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