Jake Adler is the Founder and CEO of Pilgrim, a defense biotechnology startup building battlefield-ready biotech for warfighters and national security applications.

A self-taught hardware engineer and chemist, Jake began building software at 12, hardware at 17, and chemistry at 19, graduating high school in 2022 and earning the prestigious Thiel Fellowship in 2023.

Jake's core thesis is that troops are deployed into austere environments without the medical tools needed for survival, arguing that combat medics need capabilities five to ten years ahead of civilian emergency rooms.

Pilgrim's product suite includes Argus, an airborne pathogen detection platform, Kingsfoil, a hemostatic wound dressing, and Voyager, an inhaled countermeasure for chemical threats, with a biosurveillance agreement already in place with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Pilgrim has raised $25 million in seed funding at a $150 million valuation, backed by Buckley Ventures, Peter Thiel, Brian Armstrong, Fred Ehrsam, Dylan Field, Bryan Johnson, and Anthropic researchers, with Argus units already deployed across the country.