Warhound, a Texas-based startup conceived by Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, came out of stealth on October 22 with a $200 million seed round and a reported $1.2 billion valuation. Its mission is to breed, clone and gene-edit working dogs for the U.S. military, police and first responders. The plan is to biobank top-performing dogs, mostly Belgian Malinois along with shepherds, clone them through Colossal-owned Viagen, and use gene editing licensed from Colossal to screen out inherited conditions such as hip dysplasia. The company says it is going after a real supply problem: more than 80% of U.S. military working dogs are bought from Europe, and after a pipeline of roughly three years fewer than half end up fit for service, so about 200 dogs have to be sourced to field 100.

Anduril is supplying the gear, including eye and ear protection, body armor and integration with its Eagle Eye system, so that dogs, handlers and autonomous systems work as one team. The American Humane Society will certify Warhound's training programs and help reunite retired dogs with their handlers, and Lamm expects the first dogs to be born early next year and to enter service in about two years. The $200 million is money raised from investors, not a Pentagon contract, and Warhound has no signed customers or per-dog price yet, though it is discussing a "Canine-as-a-Service" model in which the government buys a steady supply of trained dogs. Luckey and Anduril hold no equity in the company, while Colossal owns a stake and licenses its technology. The project has also drawn criticism, and the big questions are whether the military will buy and whether cloned, gene-edited dogs can perform in the field.