Colossal Biosciences cofounder and CEO Ben Lamm is worth $3.7 billion following the company’s recent fundraise at an eye-popping $10.2 billion valuation. But it has yet to be paid for reviving extinct animals or saving endangered ones.
ByAmy Feldman, Forbes Staff
Serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church started Colossal Biosciences in 2021 to bring back the woolly mammoth. It’s an idea that’s equal parts crazy and brilliant, with real-world implications for the environment, climate change and even healthcare — if they can pull it off.
With the company recently raising $200 million at a valuation of $10.2 billion, led by TWG Global, CEO Lamm is now a billionaire worth $3.7 billion, by Forbes’ estimates. Church, who started work on the concept in his lab many years before it became a company, does not have an equity stake in Colossal.
“The fact that I’m not a billionaire is almost as interesting as Ben being one,” Church said, adding, “If I had a billion dollars, I would just spend it on this.”
Church, who is 70 and known for his wild ideas, had been working on sequencing the prehistoric woolly mammoth’s genome since around 2008. “I was part of the generation that read Jurassic Park,” he said. Like many, he had an affection for big, furry extinct creatures as a kid, but unlike most he was also an expert in genomic sequencing. In 1984, he developed the first genomic sequencing method, which resulted in the first genome sequence, for the human pathogen H. pylori (which can cause stomach ulcers). He’s also cofounded some 50 biotech companies.
Church’s woolly mammoth dreams started off in his lab, with little thought of turning them into a business. The idea was so far out there that he didn’t even bring it to investors. “I was so confident that no one would fund it that I didn’t even ask,” Church said.
After giving a talk in 2013, he received $100,000 from Peter Thiel. It wasn’t even close to enough to support his research. “We were basically on life support levels of [financing] and then Ben came along and really helped raise money tremendously,” he said.
Lamm, 43, had previously founded or cofounded five companies, each of which was ultimately acquired. Among them: Hypergiant, an AI-enabled decision-making software company acquired by Josh Kushner’s venture firm Thrive Capital in 2023 for an undisclosed amount. (The vast majority of his net worth comes from Colossal.)
While still at Hypergiant, in 2019, Lamm reached out to Church after reading an article about his work on the woolly mammoth. The two met up in Church’s lab at Harvard, and ultimately launched Colossal in September 2021 with $15 million in seed funding.
The so-called de-extinction work started with digging up the remains of woolly mammoths from the Arctic permafrost and sequencing the prehistoric creature’s genome to figure out the difference between it and its closest living relative, the Asian elephant. Church and his researchers created special tools to search, understand and compare genomes with the goal of bringing the tusked Ice Age giant back to life. The company is using genetic engineering techniques that would essentially result in a mammoth-elephant hybrid that could withstand the cold.
Woolly mammoths (which are believed to have weighed between six and eight tons) are considered important because they are thought to have contributed to the preservation of the northern grasslands by grazing and trampling trees, slowing down permafrost thaw and helping keep organic carbon stored deep below the surface–an important factor in preventing climate catastrophe. Colossal hopes to create a woolly mammoth calf by 2028 (it previously said 2027). But it’s not the only extinct animal the company is targeting: the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger are also on the agenda. Lamm said he did not believe the mammoth would be the first animal to come back from extinction, implying the company is closer to resurrecting the dodo (which was extinct by 1681) or Tasmanian tiger (which was officially declared extinct in 1982), though he declined to say which one of these creatures might be first.
To fulfill its vision, Colossal has raised a total of $435 million from top investors that include Breyer Capital and Draper Associates, as well as TWG Global, the investment firm of billionaires Mark Walter and Thomas Tull. While it does not yet have revenue from its de-extinction efforts, it has spun out two additional startups: computational biology platform Form Bio (in 2022) and biological recycling company Breaking (in 2024).
Colossal’s lack of revenue means the company’s eye-popping $10.2 billion valuation is based on investors’ belief in the future potential of this Jurassic Park-like science rather than its existing business. “Colossal is the leading company working at the intersection of AI, computational biology and genetic engineering for both de-extinction and species preservation,” Walter, who is also CEO of Guggenheim Partners, said in a statement announcing the latest funding round.
“We get a lot of questions like ‘Shouldn’t the money invested in Colossal be invested in traditional approaches to conservation?,’” said Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, who is on leave from UC Santa Cruz. “Traditional approaches to conservation should receive the investment Colossal has gotten, but this is new money, new people and new ideas into a space that desperately needs it.”
Lamm, who talks a mile-a-minute, is filled with ideas for how the science the company is working on could underpin a large business, including income streams from governments that want to either reintroduce extinct species or prevent endangered ones from dying off. Governments have long paid for conservation efforts, but budgeting for this type of cutting-edge, and potentially controversial, science would be new. “If you would have told me at the beginning of 2024 that governments would pay me to do these things, I would’ve said, ‘probably not.’ Now we are seeing that change,” he said.
Colossal is currently “deep in conversations” with two governments, one of which is an island nation, about such biodiversity contracts, Lamm said. But it does not have any signed agreements yet. “For us, it’s pretty cool because the pursuit of de-extinction creates technology that we can monetize and also licensable technology,” Lamm said. “The reintroduction of animals back into their habitats creates the potential for annuities in carbon credits, nature credits and tourism taxes.” Biodiversity credits or nature credits are designed to incentivize the protection and restoration of natural environments, in similar fashion to how carbon credits have attempted to decrease carbon emissions. Colossal could potentially create income streams off these nascent markets and perhaps even snag a cut of tourism taxes from the countries that it works with.
One of the governments Colossal is talking with (which Lamm declined to identify) is focused on saving a species that’s on the brink of extinction and tends to trend male. The shortage of females and their seasonal breeding cycles mean, Lamm said, that there’s both a bottleneck with genetic diversity and a timing problem. The government’s effort could take 25 years and cost $350 million, and the species might still die off, he said.
Colossal could, instead, genetically engineer females and induce them to breed on a continual basis instead of a seasonal one, short-circuiting the process but raising ethical concerns. “Even if we were to charge them $100 million for that effort, the results would be they are saving the species guaranteed, and we are shaving 20 years off their plan and saving them hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.
Saving animals from extinction is a big deal because more than 46,300 species, representing 28% of all that have been assessed, are threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. That loss of biodiversity is harmful to the planet and throws entire ecosystems out of whack.
Lamm and Church both point to what happened in Yellowstone Park after wolves were reintroduced there in 1995. Beaver colonies returned, willows grew better and songbirds flourished. “It was a startling reminder that one species can make a difference,” Church said. That’s especially true for species that are key to keeping important environments in balance, which in turn keep the earth in balance. And elephants (including their ancient relatives like the woolly mammoth) are “key species in every environment they’ve ever been in, whether the savannah in Africa or the rainforest in Asia,” he said.
But genetically modifying creatures and releasing them into the wild to address biodiversity or forestall climate change is a controversial approach. “I think that bringing back the mammoth is ill-advised, ill-thought-through and a stunt to attract investments in their company,” said Karl Flessa, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona.
“Releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment—what could go wrong?” he said. “And releasing what is ostensibly a cold-adapted species in the face of climate change, where the habitat they are releasing it into is vanishing, I think there is an ethical question there.”
Chief science officer Shapiro said that while there are risks with modifying species and introducing them into habitats, with such enormous problems there need to be solutions. “The problem we face is habitats around the planet are changing at a rate faster than evolution can keep up,” she said. “It would not behoove us to say that it was too risky to allow ourselves to explore what these technologies can do.”
Colossal has made substantial scientific progress since its early days. It has generated genomes for each of the three species. In the mammoth, it’s demonstrated multiplex gene editing at more than 20 sites associated with cold adaptation, one of the key traits it wants to revive. In the Tasmanian tiger, it’s working on culturing embryos in an artificial uterus. The goal for the elephants, too, is to speed up their reproduction in artificial wombs, no easy feat given their size and gestation period.
Colossal’s scientific work could ultimately prove useful in human healthcare. If artificial wombs can successfully be used to bring back extinct creatures, for example, they could prove useful in human in vitro fertilization. “If we can cultivate embryos longer, which we need for Colossal, just that sub-piece of technology could be massively transformative to the IVF market,” Lamm said. (Already, a related startup from Church’s work, Gameto, is working on making IVF less invasive and more affordable by maturing eggs outside a woman’s body. “It’s technically unrelated to Colossal, but related to the interest we had in making elephant eggs,” said Church, who is an advisor to that company.)
Longer term, Lamm sees the potential for biovaults that work like a library of multiple tissue types of once-extinct creatures and critically endangered ones that researchers could rely on, as well as government contracts to bring back extinct species or save endangered ones.
He points to the company’s scientific progress in pushing aside skeptics who have wondered how long de-extinction might take or if it could happen at all. “Right now, we’re really just focused on the science because if the science doesn’t work none of this matters,” he said.
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