Buckley Ventures Leads Pilgrim’s $25M Seed for Biothreat Detection
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Pilgrim has raised $25 million in a Seed round to build hardware that detects biological threats in the air. According to the company, the round values it at $150 million.
Buckley Ventures led the financing. Two Anthropic researchers, frontier red team lead Logan Graham and technical staff member Sholto Douglas, invested as individuals, and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and other technology executives joined them. Anthropic itself did not announce a corporate investment.
Pilgrim is based in Redwood City, California. Its lead product is Argus, a 50-pound device built to detect biological threats. Founder and CEO Jake Adler describes the company as building battlefield-ready biotechnology for the defense market.
Adler finished high school in 2022 and became a Thiel Fellow in 2023. He started Pilgrim with the goal of creating a new generation of military medicine, focused on helping troops with triage and treatment in austere settings before they can reach a hospital.
Argus is not the company’s only product. A 2025 profile in Axios described Kingsfoil, a hemostatic wound dressing, and Voyager, an inhaled countermeasure for chemical threats, alongside Argus as a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear surveillance platform. The new financing puts Argus front and center.
This is not Pilgrim’s first raise. Axios reported a separate $4.3 million seed in 2025 backed by Cantos VC, Thiel Capital, Day One Ventures, Refactor Capital and others, and Figma CEO Dylan Field was among its earlier investors. At the time of that 2025 report, Pilgrim had no active Defense Department contracts, though Adler said it had made headway with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Defense Health Agency and the Joint Program Executive Office for CBRN Defense.
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