The "Captain America" among dogs has raised 1.3 billion yuan.

Come on, let's first review the classic plot of Captain America:

Skinny young Brooklynite Steve Rogers, after being injected with the super soldier serum developed by Dr. Erskine, gained physical strength, speed and resilience far exceeding ordinary people. Since then, he has transformed into Captain America, becoming a symbol of the American spirit.

Marvel has long carried Americans' imagination of superpowers. Now, this scene is being moved into reality. However, it is not human soldiers that receive transformation, but working dogs that charge into battle. The role of Dr. Erskine is played by two American tech unicorns.

Recently, Warhound, a new defense technology company founded by American tech entrepreneurs Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey, announced the completion of a $200 million seed round of financing (equivalent to more than 1.3 billion RMB).

The company's business can be glimpsed from its name: it uses genetic engineering technology to modify American working dogs, and provides the enhanced "new-type dogs" to the U.S. military, law enforcement agencies and emergency rescue personnel. According to the official plan, these dogs will in the future be specifically tasked with extreme missions that are too dangerous for humans and too complex for machines, such as bomb detection, search and other special operations.

Although Warhound's first batch of "new-type dogs" will not be put on the market for at least two years, the capital market has already shown strong interest. This round of financing includes a number of venture capital institutions such as HSG, 8VC and In-Q-Tel. After the financing is completed, the valuation of the project has reached 1.2 billion U.S. dollars (equivalent to about 8 billion RMB).

Behind this is the surging capital heat in the U.S. defense technology track.

Marriage of Two Star Unicorns

According to the information revealed by Lamm to the media, Colossal Biosciences (Colossal), which he founded, holds equity in Warhound and provides support to Warhound through technology licensing. Luckey is a partner of Warhound but does not hold equity.

The Warhound project seems sci-fi, but as long as you put the entrepreneurial experiences of the two partners together, you will find that this is actually a quite reasonable business intersection.

In 2021, Lamm, who had successfully founded and sold a number of technology companies, co-founded Colossal with renowned geneticist George Church. The goal of this biotech company is to use genetic engineering, cloning and related reproductive technologies to resurrect extinct species. The species the company currently plans to resurrect include dire wolves, mammoths, thylacines, dodos, moas and blue antelopes.

If Jurassic Park were to come to life in reality, Colossal would probably be the most suitable technical practitioner. However, strictly speaking, Colossal does not resurrect extinct species as they are, but reproduces some characteristics on existing related species by studying the gene maps of ancient species, identifying key genetic characteristics, and then using means such as gene editing.

In April 2025, Colossal, which had been established for 4 years, announced that it had bred three animals with dire wolf genetic characteristics. Although Colossal's claim to "bring dire wolves back to the world" has been widely questioned by the academic community, the imagination space of the company's technology in fields such as species conservation still attracts capital attention. In January 2025, after completing a $200 million Series C financing, Colossal reached a valuation of 10.2 billion U.S. dollars (equivalent to about 68 billion RMB). In July this year, according to foreign media reports, the company is seeking to advance a new round of financing at a valuation of at least 20 billion U.S. dollars (equivalent to more than 130 billion RMB).

As for Luckey, the other partner of Warhound, he is the founder of the well-known defense technology company Anduril.

Luckey once founded the virtual reality device company Oculus VR, and sold the company to Meta for $2 billion in 2014. In 2017, Luckey switched tracks and co-founded Anduril with former employees of the well-known defense technology company Palantir.

The name Anduril is taken from the holy sword of Aragorn, the hero in The Lord of the Rings. Different from traditional defense enterprises that produce according to sales, Anduril chooses to invest its own funds to develop products and then explore the market. The company's products cover autonomous systems, sensors and military equipment, and its core software platform Lattice can integrate multi-terminal data to help operators grasp the on-site situation.

With orders from the militaries of the United States and other countries, Anduril completed a huge $5 billion Series H financing in May this year, with its valuation soaring to $61 billion (equivalent to more than 400 billion RMB). The lead investors include a16z and Thrive Capital.

As a project jointly launched by two star unicorns, the birth of Warhound is based on the consensus of the two founders. Both Lamm and Luckey believe that there are problems with the current U.S. working dog program: more than half of the candidate dogs cannot complete the training due to genetic diseases (such as poor eyesight, cancer, hip dysplasia, etc.). The goal of Warhound is to breed working dogs with better health conditions, higher training completion rates and higher mission completion rates.

In the process of project implementation, the businesses of the two companies are complementary: Colossal is responsible for extracting cell lines of excellent working dogs and performing gene editing, while adding performance genes and removing unhelpful genes to create a new type of dog. Anduril provides products such as protective vests and goggles to comprehensively improve the situational awareness and coordination ability of police dogs and instructors.

VCs Crowded in the Defense Track

The ambitious Warhound project will not be able to show its true quality until at least two years later. According to Lamm, the first batch of new-type working dogs hatched by the Warhound project are expected to be born early next year, and will be put into use within two years under ideal conditions. At present, Warhound's target customers are emergency rescue personnel, the Department of Defense, military units and police forces, but the selling price of the dogs has not yet been determined.

A project that has no substantial results and no closed business model has won $200 million in financing from the very beginning. This not only stems from the endorsement of the two star unicorns Colossal and Anduril, but also is inseparable from the current financing boom in the defense technology track.

Data shared by PitchBook and Defense News shows that in 2025, venture capital transaction volume in the global defense technology field soared to a record $49.1 billion, compared with $27.2 billion the previous year. The investors of Warhound's this round of financing include 8VC, which has invested in Anduril, and In-Q-Tel, a venture capital institution supported by the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

The beginning of this round of U.S. defense technology investment boom can be roughly traced back to 2017, the beginning of Trump's first presidential term. That year, the Trump administration released the National Security Strategy of the United States, which regarded China and Russia as strategic competitors facing the United States. As the U.S. defense strategy puts great power competition at its core, innovations in commercial technology fields such as AI, autonomous systems and advanced sensors have also been rapidly introduced into the military field. Coupled with the increasingly tense geopolitical situation, the continuously rising defense budgets of various countries, and the verified value of emerging defense technology products in actual combat, a large amount of hot money has begun to pour into this track.

At present, well-known venture capital institutions such as a16z, HSG, 8VC and Thrive Capital have all invested in defense technology projects. Among them, a16z even set up a special fund called "American Dynamism" in 2023, focusing on "key industries" such as national defense, aerospace and manufacturing.

Anduril, which is at the center of the boom, has a financing trajectory that is a microcosm of the track's popularity. In 2017, the year of its establishment, Anduril received only $17.5 million in seed round investment, with a valuation of less than $100 million. By May this year, Anduril's Series H financing had soared to $5 billion, with its valuation soaring to $61 billion (equivalent to more than 400 billion RMB), and the total accumulated financing exceeded $11 billion.

Growing up together with Anduril are companies such as Shield AI, which develops AI pilot software and drones, Saronic, which develops autonomous surface ships, and Castelion, which develops hypersonic strike missiles. As for the Warhound project, it can be regarded as an extension of U.S. defense technology into the field of biotechnology.

Interestingly, in Warhound's financing announcement, in addition to gene editing technology, another word appears frequently — supply chain.

Warhound emphasizes that at present, not only more than half of the candidate dogs in the U.S. military working dog program fail to complete the training, but the over-reliance on overseas breeders also makes "the United States have to rely on foreign supply chains with limited resources." Therefore, Warhound hopes to improve the current program level through cutting-edge domestic engineering technology in the United States, so that in the future, "there is no need to bear the waiting time, price fluctuations or geopolitical risks of foreign supply chains."

In this light, it is certainly amazing that the Captain America plot has come into reality, but from a deep logical point of view, Warhound is more like a strange flower growing under Trumpism.

This article is from WeChat Official Account "ChinaVenture", written by Li Xinting, and published with authorization from 36Kr.