Colossal Biosciences: The $10 Billion AI Startup bringing Wooly Mammoths back to life

In partnership with

(6 minutes)

Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• This startup is bringing extinct species like Dodos and Wooly Mammoths back to life

• They already have 16 partner labs and over 170 scientists working on this

• They’ve just raised a $200 Million Series C at a $10.2B valuation led by TWG Global

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Colossal Biosciences 📈

Colossal Biosciences was founded in 2021 by Ben Lamm and George Church to take on humanity’s duty to restore Earth to a healthier state, starting with the Wooly Mammoth. 🦣

Colossal is the first “De-extinction” company, focusing on a suite of tools and tech that will ultimately become our de-extinction toolkit.

This will be used to bring back extinct species like Wooly Mammoths, Thylacines (Tasmanian Tiger), and Dodos. 🦤

But why would the world benefit from bringing back these extinct species? 🌎

Ecosystem restoration. When animals are reintroduced into biodiversity ecosystems they were lost from, they fill that ecosystem void. This way the entire ecosystem benefits.

In the case of mammoths, the goal is to bring them back into arctic areas in the Tundra to start repopulating that area with more biodiversity. 🌲

Colossal does all of this using a combination of really cutting edge genetic rescue tech and next-gen sequencing to understand genomes. 

They also use AI computer analysis to understand the differences between those genomes and edit them. 🧬

The oldest DNA we can currently read is a little over 1 million years old - there’s a 64 million year gap in this discovery. ⌛

Ben Lamm says that by 2028, we will see our first de-extinction event based on recent accelerations and breakthroughs.

Backstory 👀

Ben Lamm was born in Austin Texas, and had always been passionate about tech and entrepreneurship. 🧑‍💻

Before Colossal, Ben had built and sold 5 software and tech companies 💎:

• Simply interactive - A custom e-learning startup 📚 [Acquired by Agile] (2010)

• Chaotic Moon - A creative tech studio that designed mobile software products 📲[Acquired by Accenture NYSE: ACN] (2015)

• Team Chaos - A game design studio 🎮 [Acquired by Zynga NASDAQ: ZNGA] (2016)

• Conversable - An AI conversation intelligence platform 🗣️ [Acquired by LivePerson NASDAQ: LPSN] (2018)

• Hypergiant Industries - An enterprise AI company focused on solving problems in space, defense and critical infrastructure ☄️ [Acquired by Trive Capital] (2023)

He also co-founded Spatial Worlds - an AI company revolutionizing how organisations see and understand their physical environments. 🌌

Despite being pretty successful and building tech companies, none of these were actually changing the world. They just made money, provided jobs and got acquired.

None of these were step-function changes.

Ready to level up your work with AI?

HubSpot’s free guide to using ChatGPT at work is your new cheat code to go from working hard to hardly working

HubSpot’s guide will teach you:

• How to prompt like a pro

• How to integrate AI in your personal workflow

• Over 100+ useful prompt ideas

All in order to help you unleash the power of AI for a more efficient, impactful professional life.

Get the free guide and level up your AI game today!

Cold call 🤙

Ben then had the idea of using software and AI to create a platform to make it easier for scientists to make discoveries faster. 🤖 This way he could actually make a change.

So he cold called George Church - the Head of Genetics at Harvard and arguably The Father of synthetic biology & genetic engineering with the idea. 💡

Ben was weirdly curious on the call and asked what else George was working on. 🤔He touched on 3 things: Regenerating neurons, stuff to combat climate change, then his tone changed…

He did this Steve Jobs thing, where on the last 2 minutes of the call he’s like: “I’m also working to bring back Wooly Mammoths to put them back into the Arctic and help replenish biodiversity there”. 💣

George then said he had a meeting to attend and left with a quick “Goodbye”.

Ben was absolutely shocked because this was one of the greatest minds in the world and he just casually dropped this information. 🤯

He then stayed up all night watching all these videos and reading all these interviews with George.

Regardless of who he was talking to, there was always a through line with the Mammoth, and it was very clear his voice changed when he talked about it. 🤩 He was massively excited about it.

A week and a half later, Ben was at George’s lab, they’d both missed all their meetings that day, and they sat down to figure out how to build a “De-extinction company”.

Raising Capital 💰

Ben’s close friends and advisors strongly advised him not to do this because he’d just throw away his career. 😖

The original pitch when they started was that bringing back Wooly Mammoths was possible and they could do it, and they thought this was valuable.

They just didn’t know why it was valuable yet. 💎

They got weird responses despite both founders having a good track record.

Ben and George had to look for investors with much longer time horizons, this couldn’t be your average SaaS player. 🏛️

They just wouldn’t be the right fit.

To make this possible they looked for investors that helped move entire industries forward and this worked. 🧱

In May 2021, they raised a $15 million seed led by billionaire Thomas Tull to properly start their research. 💰

Stats 📊

3 and a half years ago, Colossal had zero scientists. Now they fund 40 post-doctorate degrees and academic labs around the world. 🧑‍⚕️

They also have over 170 scientists on their team and have partnered with 16 Partner Labs around the world including Stockholm University and University of Melbourne. 🏫

Colossal has partnered with 48 conservation partners including Re:Wild, Save the Elephants, Biorescue and Birdlife. 🦜

So far they’ve:

• Acquired 60+ ancient genomes for the Wooly Mammoth 🦣

• Completed 99.9% of Thylacine de-extinction genomes using ancient long reads and ancient RNA. This is a world’s first and was once thought impossible. 🐅

• Generated high coverage genomes for the Dodo. Processed over 10,000 eggs and optimized them for culture conditions. 🦤

💰On January 15th 2025, Colossal Biosciences raised a $200 million Series C at a $10.2 billion valuation led by TWG Capital with participation from Mark Walter and Thomas Tull, bringing their total raised to $435 million.

So what do you think? Are Wooly Mammoths coming back to life soon?

Before you go 👋

Thank you for reading.

Know someone who'd love this newsletter? Share the love.🌟