Colossal Biosciences reveals 260 scientists, $650M raised, and new blue buck project — with more unannounced species coming

Colossal Biosciences

Ben Lamm's de-extinction company has assembled 260 full-time scientists, 17 academic partners, 80 postdocs in academia, and 75 global conservation partners since its founding — and has now closed just under $650M in total funding. Five government partners are also online.

What they've built

The pipeline became tangible in 2024. Colossal produced "woolly mice" — at the time the most genetically modified multicellular organisms ever created — by inserting mouse equivalents of mammoth genes into mouse cells. A month later came the dire wolves, reconstructed from a 73,000-year-old skull and a 12,000-year-old tooth. Both projects demonstrated the full end-to-end workflow: ancient DNA identification, ancestral state reconstruction, cell editing, quality control, and live animal delivery.

The editing capability has scaled sharply. Two years ago the team was running three to five edits at a time. They're now running over 200 simultaneous edits, with no ceiling in sight.

“Last year we had a couple of watershed moments. We showed the world the woolly mice... then we showed the world the dire wolves where we took about 73,000 year old skull and a 12,000 year old tooth and made puppies... two years ago we were doing three to five edits at a time. We're now doing over 200 edits at a time.”

Species pipeline

Announced projects include the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, dodo, moa, and — as of last week — the blue buck. On the blue buck, Lamm says Colossal is already well past early-stage work: ancient DNA sequencing, comparative genomics, stem cell work, and antelope cloning are done. The team is now in the editing phase. More unannounced species are coming; Lamm says it's "highly likely" that additional projects will simply surface, direwolf-style, without prior announcement.

Business model

The commercial thesis extends well beyond live animals. Colossal has spun out four companies in four years, two announced and two not. One that leaked — Astromech — raised its last round at a $2B valuation at nine months old.

The government channel is growing. Lamm describes a pitch to sovereigns built around biodiversity as an underwritten economic asset: Colossal helps governments catalogue and protect species by demonstrating their downstream commercial value. The Gila monster is his anchor example — venom from that species contributed to the development of GLP-1 drugs, now a trillion-dollar market. The argument to governments is pragmatic: if environmental ethics won't move them, economics might.

On consumer-facing revenue, Lamm is skeptical of traditional zoos as the model, calling them "a little antiquated" and "transactional." The more likely path is ecotourism partnerships where animals live in natural habitats, paired with educational and media experiences that put the science on display alongside the animals. He frames Kruger National Park as the closer analogue.

The synthetic biology platform itself — spanning conservation, government data tools, and human healthcare and disease modelling — is where Lamm expects the largest long-term revenue. Ecotourism and media, he says, will be "dwarfed" by the government and synthetic biology business.