Pilgrim, led by Jake Adler, recently closed a $25 million seed funding round, valuing the Redwood City-based startup at $150 million. The company is focused on developing hardware, specifically a 50-pound device named Argus, designed to detect airborne biological threats. This funding aims to advance the development and testing of this technology.
Key investors in this round include Buckley Ventures, which led the investment. Notably, Logan Graham, Anthropic's frontier red team lead, and Sholto Douglas, a member of Anthropic's technical staff, invested in Pilgrim in their individual capacities. Other prominent investors include Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and Figma chief executive Dylan Field. This round builds on a previous $4.3 million seed round in 2025 that saw participation from Cantos VC and Thiel Capital, among others.
The investment highlights growing concerns within the AI industry regarding biosecurity risks, extending beyond AI model security to encompass real-world protective infrastructure. While the Anthropic researchers' personal involvement indicates an overlap of concerns between advanced AI safety and biological threat detection, it does not constitute a corporate endorsement of Pilgrim's system by Anthropic. The company will need to prove Argus's dependable performance in the field and secure government contracts to achieve operational success, especially given its focus on military and national security buyers.
