Jake Adler's Pilgrim raises $25M to detect airborne biological threats

Why it matters

Pilgrim is turning concern about biological threats into a hardware and procurement bet. Its $150 million reported valuation reflects investor confidence; Argus will still need to prove it can detect threats dependably in the field and meet the demands of government buyers.

Jake Adler's Pilgrim raised $25 million in a seed round to develop hardware for detecting biological threats in the air, bringing two Anthropic researchers into the investor group as individuals. The WSJ reported that the round valued the Redwood City, California, startup at $150 million, according to Pilgrim. Buckley Ventures led it, and Anthropic's Logan Graham and Sholto Douglas invested personally alongside Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and other technology executives.

Graham and Douglas invested as individuals; Anthropic did not announce a corporate investment. Pilgrim's stated product, Argus, is a 50-pound device intended to detect biological threats. Its backers are funding hardware and biotechnology aimed at sensing pathogens, an unusually physical bet for an AI-adjacent financing.

A founder's bet on the people in the fight

Adler's path to Pilgrim began with an interest in measuring the human body. On his personal site, he describes starting with wearable devices, then building software, hardware and chemistry projects. He graduated from high school in 2022 and became a Thiel Fellow in 2023. He now describes Pilgrim as a company building battlefield-ready biotechnology. Adler's X account is linked from that site.

In a 2025 interview with Axios, Adler described starting Pilgrim with the ambition of creating a new generation of military medicine. His argument centers on what happens after weapons inflict injuries: troops need tools for triage and treatment in austere settings, before they can reach a hospital. "You can't have a force multiplier without the underlying force," he told Axios. "If you can't stop the bleed, if you can't help that warfighter pick up their gun, then it doesn't matter."

Pilgrim's product list extends beyond pathogen monitoring. In its 2025 profile, Axios described Kingsfoil, a hemostatic wound dressing, and Voyager, an inhaled countermeasure for chemical threats, alongside Argus, its chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear surveillance platform. The products are built around military medicine closer to the point of injury and exposure. The new financing puts Argus in the foreground, while the company's broader thesis centers on sustaining people in the field.

From detection device to defense procurement

A compact detector is only useful to military and national-security buyers if it can perform under field conditions. Argus will have to earn trust through evidence on what it can identify, how quickly it can do so, and how reliably it distinguishes a threat from background material. Its 50-pound weight gives readers a sense of the hardware involved; it does not establish field readiness or detection performance.

Commercially, technical demonstrations and procurement relationships are separate hurdles. Axios reported in 2025 that Pilgrim had no active Defense Department contracts. Adler said the company had made headway with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Defense Health Agency and Joint Program Executive Office for CBRN Defense. That report describes the situation at the time, not Pilgrim's current contract status. The new capital can support development and testing; the financing alone says nothing about deployment.

The capital also comes with a steep valuation claim for an early-stage hardware company. The $150 million figure was reported by the WSJ as the valuation Pilgrim gave for the $25 million round. Investors named in the reporting span defense- and technology-adjacent circles: Buckley Ventures led, Graham and Douglas invested personally, Fred Ehrsam participated, and Figma chief executive Dylan Field was among earlier investors. Axios reported a separate $4.3 million seed round in 2025, backed by Cantos VC, Thiel Capital, Day One Ventures, Refactor Capital and others. Axios did not name Buckley among those backers. The current round's size and named participants show that Pilgrim has attracted a larger pool of capital and high-profile individual investors; they do not establish customer demand or product performance.

The Anthropic connection is easy to overread. The WSJ identifies Graham as the lab's frontier red team lead and Douglas as a member of its technical staff. Their personal investments place people working on advanced AI safety and security near a company focused on biological threat detection. That is a notable overlap of concerns; it does not mean Anthropic has endorsed Pilgrim's system or concluded that AI has created a specific biological threat.

Adler is asking investors to back a practical proposition: military forces need better ways to detect biological hazards and care for wounded personnel in difficult environments. The new round gives Pilgrim more room to build toward that goal. The next proof point is operational: whether Argus can produce dependable detections where the company says it is meant to work, and whether government buyers will adopt it.