“Finding a dodo bird…”
Colossal Biosciences, the company that’s famously on a mission to bring back the woolly mammoth and two other extinct species, has raised a $200 million Series C at a $10.2 billion valuation from TWG Global, the investment company of Guggenheim Partners co-founder Mark Walter and the billionaire Thomas Tull. The funding comes two years after the company closed its previous round at a reported valuation of $1.5 billion.
Why did investors pour so much capital at an eye-popping valuation for a company that has yet to generate any revenue and whose flagship projects, resurrecting an extinct mammoth and Tasmanian tiger, are not expected to be completed until 2028?
“The investor base has been very impressed with the speed at which we’ve created new technologies,” Ben Lamm, Colossal Biosciences’ co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
The company claims it has made significant breakthroughs on all three of its main projects, which, in addition to the mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger (also known as the thylacine), includes the dodo bird, and is on schedule or even ahead of it to resurrect these animals.
Colossal’s approach to bringing back extinct animals involves mapping the entire genome of the species and then comparing it to their closest living relative, which in the case of the mammoth is the Asian elephant. Lamm said this phase has been completed for the mammoth and the thylacine, and now the company’s scientists are using the gene-editing tool CRISPR to edit the Asian elephant’s cells. In the final step, those cells will be put into an egg cell, and the embryo will be implanted into an elephant, which will give birth to a baby mammoth, Lamm explained.
To achieve its mission, Colossal has been building various technologies, including artificial wombs, which is how the company hopes future generations of “de-extinct” animals will be born.
“Some of those technologies alone are world-changing for human healthcare, for agtech, for all these different categories,” he said.
While Colossal Biosciences’ ultimate goal is to restore extinct species and enhance biodiversity, the company’s primary value for investors likely lies in the potential of its technologies.
See here, here, here, and here for some background. I follow this because it’s cool and intriguing, and also because this is a Texas-based company – here’s the DMN story – so I’m interested in that angle as well. They’re clearly making progress and investors believe in them, but the proof will ultimately be in the de-extincted mammoth or dodo or sabertooth tiger. Stay tuned. Axios has more.