Pilgrim raises $25M seed for a device that detects biological threats from the air

Pilgrim, a U.S. defense-biotechnology company based in Redwood, California, has raised a $25 million seed round led by Buckley at a $150 million valuation. The Wall Street Journal reported the funding on September 23. The startup has built a device of roughly 50 pounds that samples air and uses genomic sequencing to detect biological threats.

Air sampling plus sequencing

The company's platform, Argus, is a fully autonomous system for detecting biological threats in near real time. It collects airborne particles and sequences the genetic material it captures, which lets it identify viruses, pathogenic bacteria and bio-aerosols directly from the environment instead of waiting for samples to reach a laboratory. Bloomberg reported that the system is designed to flag threats such as Ebola and anthrax. Pilgrim lists ports, hospitals, farms and other high-risk operational sites among the environments it targets.

The company describes its focus as battlefield-ready biotechnology — survivability, medical countermeasures and sensing rather than weapons development. Earlier work includes Kingsfoil, a hemostatic dressing for severe bleeding, and Voyager, an inhaled countermeasure concept for chemical hazards that remains in prototyping.

Anthropic-linked investors

The round drew attention because two leaders associated with Anthropic, a company that treats biological misuse as a central AI-safety concern, are backing a hardware-based biosurveillance effort. The financing is a step up from a $4.3 million seed reported in 2025 that included Cantos, Thiel Capital, Day One Ventures and Refactor Capital. Among Pilgrim's listed backers are Peter Thiel, Brian Armstrong, Dylan Field, Buckley Ventures, Conviction, Cantos, Refactor and Bryan Johnson. In a job posting, the company says it has raised more than $30 million to date.

What comes next

Pilgrim is working with the CDC, according to Bloomberg. As of September 2025 it had no active Department of Defense contract, though it said it was engaging with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Defense Health Agency and the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense.

Any field-deployable detector faces the same tests before wide adoption: validation accuracy, false positives and negatives, ruggedness, manufacturing and regulatory review, plus government procurement cycles. Dealroom, which tracks startup funding, described the round as a sign that investors are moving early on biosecurity hardware, betting that automated threat detection becomes part of critical infrastructure.