Happy Monday! Today is the beginning of Halloween week and to get us in the mood, we have two truly spooky stories for you: Genetically bred war dogs and post-quantum cryptography. However before we get into the war of it all, we’d like to thank you for making our launch so incredibly successful. We have had over 1 million views on YouTube and here on Substack in our first two weeks alone which far exceeds our expectations. If you’re enjoying the videos and this newsletter, please share us with your friends and coworkers! Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Warhound Launches With $200 Million to Clone and Gene-Edit Military Dogs
A new defense startup that wants to clone and genetically edit working dogs for the U.S. military came out of hiding this week with $200 million in funding and a $1.2 billion valuation, despite having no signed customers and no animals born yet.
The company, Warhound, was announced Thursday. It was conceived by Ben Lamm, co-founder of the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences, and Palmer Luckey, co-founder of the defense-tech company Anduril. Its stated aim is to produce healthier, more capable dogs for military, police and first-responder work, and to fit them with Anduril-built protective and sensing gear. It’s been reported that the investors in this round include Sequoia Capital, 8VC, Corner Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the venture arm backed by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. This round values the company at $1.2 billion.
Warhound is currently collecting genetic material from top-performing service dogs in the military and biobanking their cells. It then intends to clone those proven animals and make targeted gene edits. Gene editing has already begun on cell samples from the first donor dogs. Colossal’s sister company Viagen will handle the cloning with the first batch about to be cloned and incubated, with births expected in early 2027 and service ideally starting within two years.
Ben Lamm said that many dogs fail training because of inherited problems such as poor eyesight, cancer, hip dysplasia and muscle atrophy, and that these edits would remove those traits. Further out, he said, edits could improve speed, agility and sense of smell for tasks like bomb detection. The dog breeds they are using are said to be Belgian Malinois, German Shepherds, and Labradors.
Part of the pitch for Warhound is that it would fix the US’s dependence on a foreign supply. Warhound claims that more than 80% of the 2,200 U.S. military working dogs come from Europe, and that more than half of dogs considered for service do not complete training. The military has a documented interest in better breeding, with them in the past studying the genetics of scent and retrieval behavior.
Lastly, Anduril will supply body armor, eye and ear protection, and sensors that relay data to handlers. They say that the technology will be “on top of the dog, not in the dog.” So, in case you were concerned about cyber-super-dogs, it seems like it’s more of a horse armor situation.
Pentagon, DARPA and White House Push Quantum Computing From Lab Toward the Battlefield
The U.S. government is accelerating its push to put quantum technology to military use, pairing new money with hard deadlines even as the most powerful machines remain years away. Earlier this month the Pentagon announced a roughly $350 million quantum computing initiative, citing potential uses in logistics, advanced materials and next-generation weapons. This is part of a larger push to field a powerful quantum computer for scientific research and Pentagon-fielded quantum sensors by 2028, and a federal move to post-quantum cryptography by 2030 or 2031. The Defense Department’s own strategy says all its systems must support post-quantum cryptography by the end of 2030 or be phased out.
The clearest signal of who might deliver working hardware came in early October, when IBM and IonQ advanced to the final stage of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, alongside Atom Computing and Diraq. IonQ said its agreement is worth up to $300 million, with funding beyond the initial obligation subject to future appropriations. DARPA says the program is meant to determine whether any approach can reach utility-scale operation by 2033, and it has stressed it will not pick a single winner. Washington is also becoming a shareholder: Commerce finalized $100 million awards each for D-Wave and Rigetti, giving the government minority, non-controlling equity stakes, while IonQ, left out of that round, holds a place on the Missile Defense Agency’s $151 billion Golden Dome contract vehicle.
That is all from us today. If you see a news story in defense technology and business that you’d like us to cover shoot us a message, and we’ll see you soon!