Ok, multiple people have pinged me with warhound and I obviously have thoughts that I feel like unleashing so here goes Maximally charitable ones first (= what their marketing leans on) - 1. We are already doing genetic engineering with dogs, albeit crudely and slowly, and we do not do it with dog welfare in mind. The pug gasping for air with a nose fashioned to be cute, the inbred golden with 2.5x cancer mortality, the dachshund whose short legs come with 50x odds for intervertebral disc disease, there is no patting ourselves on the back with the status-quo here. 2. K9 units are already a thing and they send dogs out in dangerous situations like sniffing for explosives and dropping out of choppers, with a cottage-industry of small players building ear/eye protection and other equipment. But there's a huge gap between what human soldiers get vs dogs, and it's hard to argue against balancing this out. Thoughts on the business - 3. When @Itamar_Bitan and I ran the numbers, we estimated total budget of K9 units globally to be around a billion, incl everything (dogs, people, equipment etc). 1.2B val implies at least a 10x higher multiplier, which makes me curious on the story here. Personal security is the obvious one, and perhaps K9 units take bigger bites out of budgets with good ways to deploy capital. The funner version is scaling plays like sniffing out screwworms, gen biosecurity shield, gas leaks and all the other olfactory needle-in-haystack problems. Maybe an eventual consumer play with designer pets. 4. This seems like a classic 2026 kingmaker-VC move, a phenomenal team to bet on, and ex-Palantir CEO/In-Q-Tel (CIA VC) backing + main buyer being US govt. I'd be curious how the geopolitics plays out though, and it leaving room for the underdogs (EU/Asia). Less charitable thoughts - 5. Do you optimize for your german shepherd to be healthier, or to be more aggressive/fierce/stronger? There are always trade-offs and I'm not sure I see the incentives to keep the dog's health/welfare at the forefront 6. Same q but on drawing a line on the body when it comes to tech. There are already companies wanting to drill holes in dogs and implant electrodes. Where are the incentives to not do this (except the ones where we still don't know how to do this safely ofc) Philosophical parting-barks - 6. I think it's wise to be thoughtful about how the line between dogs being companions (subjects) vs tools (objects) can easily be blurred and modulated. E.g. I usually correct people when they describe @dognosis as "using dogs to sniff out cancer" to "working with dogs" and I'm not trying to be pedantic, I genuinely think that it's an important difference worth emphasising. As usual, Haraway says it better. At a time where we're trying to figure out what aligning different intelligences entails, it's worth paying closer attention to how we work with our best friends