Defense Biotech Pilgrim Raises $25M Seed at $150M Valuation

Battlefield medevac is getting harder to count on. In an era when drones and surveillance assets watch a battlefield in real time, sending a helicopter to retrieve a wounded soldier can be a gamble with the aircraft itself. U.S. military doctrine has begun redefining a combat casualty not as a soldier who’s wounded, but one who can no longer fight — because evacuation may not come for hours, or at all. Pilgrim is building hardware for the soldiers who have to survive that gap.

Based in Redwood City, California, Pilgrim is a defense biotechnology startup developing three product lines. Kingsfoil is a clay-based hemostatic dressing that turns into a gel on contact with blood, sealing massive hemorrhage within seconds. Voyager is an inhalable countermeasure meant to neutralize chemical threats like nerve agents. Argus is an autonomous biosurveillance device that detects and identifies airborne biological threats in near real time. This round backs Argus specifically: the 50-pound unit combines air sampling with genomic sequencing to detect pathogens like Ebola and anthrax, and it’s already deployed across the U.S. under a biosurveillance agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Pilgrim was founded by Jake Adler, who went straight into startup life after finishing high school in 2022 and was named a Thiel Fellow in 2023. He’d been starting ventures since he was twelve. Last year, Adler drew attention by sending investors a video of himself cutting both thighs and packing only one wound with Kingsfoil to demonstrate the clotting effect side by side — a stunt that helped close an earlier funding round. Cantos partner Ian Rountree, who led that round, said the firm looks for people who stand out and are a little weird, calling Adler exceptional. Adler has described the Pentagon as his first and most important market, arguing that combat medics need capabilities that are five to ten years ahead of civilian emergency rooms.

Multiple outlets report that Pilgrim has raised $25 million in seed funding, though the company itself hasn’t issued a formal announcement. Buckley Ventures led the round at a $150 million valuation — a striking number for a seed round, where valuations typically run in the single-digit to low tens of millions. Pilgrim’s mark is closer to what many startups command at Series B, for a two-year-old company still early in revenue. That gap signals just how much conviction investors are putting behind the defense biotech niche.

The investor roster backs up that conviction. Anthropic’s Logan Graham, who heads the company’s Frontier Red Team, and Sholto Douglas, a member of its technical staff, invested personally, alongside Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam. Earlier backers who returned for this round include Peter Thiel, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Figma CEO Dylan Field, Ramp co-founder Karim Atiyeh, and biohacking entrepreneur Bryan Johnson.

The pace of Pilgrim’s fundraising stands out on its own. A $3.25 million pre-seed in March 2025, backed by Thiel Capital, Cantos, and Refactor Capital, grew to $4.3 million that August with Day One Ventures joining in. Roughly two years after founding, the company has now raised $25 million more — an unusually fast trajectory for a niche category like defense biotech.

Pilgrim isn’t alone in biosurveillance. Ginkgo Biosecurity, the public Ginkgo Bioworks’ biosecurity unit, has run traveler-based genomic surveillance with the CDC at seven U.S. airports for years — a fundamentally different approach, relying on traveler samples and wastewater sequencing rather than autonomous field hardware. Cayuga Biotech, backed by Defense Health Agency research funding, is targeting the same hemorrhage-control market as Kingsfoil with a synthetic polyphosphate nanoparticle therapeutic.