🕶️ $1.2B startup is cloning war dogs

Good morning, founders 🕶️
Hope your keys are rotated and your dog is fit for service.

More than 80% of the US military's working dogs come from Europe, and fewer than half make the cut. That's a dull sentence, and it just raised $200 million. Today's stories share that pattern: the boring dependency is the real asset. A nearly 150-year-old paint company expects its data-center sales to triple. Railway users learned their secret keys were only as safe as their host. And Lovable's growth lead says three customers won the same way beat ten won ten ways. The shiny part gets the headline; the dull part sets the price. So which boring thing does your company quietly depend on?

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Enterprise buyers won’t put your product near their customer data without a SOC 2 report. Twenty-one state privacy laws now hold them accountable for the vendors they share data with, so their diligence lands on you.

Sprinto gets you audit ready in 14 days, across three working sessions. AI agents connect your stack, collect the evidence auditors ask for, and close the gaps as they appear. You approve, they execute.

Sprinto also answers the security questionnaires your buyers send, using the same evidence base, so security reviews stop holding up deals.

No compliance hire. No consultant. Your auditor signs off.

Learn more and get $1,000 off.

The guy trying to bring back the woolly mammoth has picked a more practical animal. Warhound, a startup Ben Lamm dreamed up with Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, came out of stealth Thursday with $200 million from In-Q-Tel (the CIA-backed venture firm, not a dog trainer), Sequoia and 8VC, at a $1.2 billion valuation.

What is Warhound? It takes cell lines from the two top working breeds, the Belgian Malinois and the German Shepherd, and plans to edit their genes: add what helps, remove what doesn't. Lamm says the goal is healthier, longer-lived dogs, possibly with sharper noses for bomb sniffing. Anduril adds gear like sensor-packed vests, "on top of the dog, not in the dog."

The science gets the headlines. The supply chain is what makes it a business. Per the company:

So the military depends on foreign kennels for a dog that usually doesn't make the cut.

Colossal eats first: Colossal owns equity in Warhound and licenses it the technology. The cloning partner, Viagen, is another Colossal company. (Luckey holds no equity.) Before Warhound sells a dog, its parent has a stake, a licensing deal and a sister company doing the cloning.

Price on request: what Warhound hasn't worked out is what to charge. Its likely buyers are the Defense Department, police forces and first responders.

Sell the bottleneck: Warhound isn't pitching "better dogs." It's pitching a dependency its buyer can't afford to lose and can't fix alone. If your product sits on a supply line your customer worries about, open the deck with that worry, not your tech.

Looking ahead… The first litter is due early next year, and Lamm hopes the dogs enter service within two years. The first price tag will tell us whether a dog can carry a unicorn.

In this video we break down SaaS metrics from the very basics, to the most complex, but future-preducting cohort tables.

Your invoice-reminder app just got a coworker, and it doesn't need a desk. On Wednesday, Anthropic opened a waitlist for Claude Duet, an agent that watches your work apps, sends you a morning brief and handles tasks while your laptop is closed. It's a research preview, starting with US Pro and Max subscribers.

Late to the party, aiming at the office: Duet lands in a fight already underway with Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots, per CNBC. VentureBeat lays out who wants what:

That's the home-screen fight. The bigger one is a level down, in the tools agents use.

Your product, now a task: Duet works through 6,000+ connectors in Anthropic's marketplace. Anthropic's examples: find unpaid invoices in QuickBooks or Stripe and draft reminders, run payroll in Gusto, write HubSpot follow-ups, send agreements through Docusign. Plenty of startups sell exactly one of those jobs today.

It isn't a free-for-all. Duet asks before it sends a message, pays, signs or deletes anything, and a few moves, like trading securities or moving money between accounts, are off-limits even with approval. Anthropic also admits personal errands like booking tickets "aren't quite as strong" yet. Work comes first.

Plug in or get played: if your product is a reminder, brief or dashboard on top of someone else's data, Duet now does a version of it inside a $20 plan. Check which of your features its morning brief replaces, then ship a connector, so when the agent goes looking for a tool, it finds yours.

What to watch: Duet is waitlist-only and doesn't yet cover Team or Enterprise plans. If it does, single-purpose SMB tools will feel it.

Scale your growth: Join names like HubSpot, Ahrefs, and Deel. Put your product in front of 85,000+ startup founders. Let's talk.