AI + 合成生物学：人类历史上最具颠覆性的技术 | Ben Lamm（Colossal）

The idea of bringing back the woolly mammoth has been around for a long time. You jump in and take the mantle of CEO. I don't know if you were expecting to do that.

I was going to fund it as a side project at first, but then I thought it was really interesting. Our first biological-products company spun out, which was Breaking, our plastic-degradation company. The same system that can bring you a mammoth can also make microbes that can break the chemical bonds of plastics.

So, Colossal is a parent company that's spinning out a dozen companies, each of which has massive potential. We'll talk about a couple of them here. A couple of them are super top secret, and we can't discuss them, but they're as big or bigger.

I think every company should be an AI company or is an AI company. We feel like the synthetic-biology part of our work is really interesting, so we don't always lead with AI. But without AI, we would not be able to do anything that we're doing.

What Ben is building inside of Colossal is a platform and an engine for creating living products: being able to design using AI and then build living products.

I asked George Church if he had one project—if he could work on one project for the rest of time with unlimited capital—what would it be? He didn't hesitate. It wasn't like, “Let me think about it. Let me get back to you.” He instantly said, “I would work to bring back mammoths. I'd rewild them back into the ecosystems, and I'd build technology that could be applied to saving species and also human healthcare.”

Now, that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. How do you like having Elon as your warm-up act?

Yeah, that's the greatest thing ever.

Yeah, that's pretty awesome. He loves woolly mammoths.

He does. He does, and he wants Jurassic Park. He's not alone. He's not alone. I'm not saying that's for me; I'm just saying that he's not alone.

I understand that. It's the number-one request we get. And then megalodons are number 2, which is also really weird.

Well, megalodons are just cool. I mean, they littered their teeth all over the ocean floor. They're still scary. I said they're scary—Jaws times 100.

We have enough of the ocean without it.

Jaws times 100.

Yeah. As we're going along here, please use your Slido app to add questions. First of all, I've known you now since pretty much the beginning of Colossal.

Yeah, you were like first text.

First side text, yeah. I am such a fan of you as a CEO, first and foremost, and then, second, of the company. The idea of bringing back the woolly mammoth has been around for a long time. It had been played around with in nonprofits and so forth. Let me summarize: This man meets George Church, one of the greatest synthetic biologists, CRISPR gene editors, and entrepreneurs, and a professor at Harvard Medical School, and you ask him, “What's your favorite pet project?”

I asked him if he had one project—if he could work on one project for the rest of time with unlimited capital—what would it be? He didn't hesitate. It wasn't like, “Let me think about it. Let me get back to you.” He instantly said, “I would work to bring back mammoths. I'd rewild them back into the ecosystems, and I'd build technology that could be applied to saving species and also human healthcare.”

So, you jump in and take the mantle of CEO. I don't know if you were expecting to do that.

I was going to fund it as a side project at first, but then I thought it was really interesting.

You build a company that goes from zero to a $10 billion valuation in 4 years. It's massively undervalued. I totally agree with you. I love you. It's you as the CEO who has done this. You built an extraordinary team. Thank you so much, Ben. How big is the team now?

We have 260 scientists—200 here in the U.S. and 60 in Australia—and a significant number of AI programmers.

Yeah, exactly. You've become an AI company.

Yeah. I think every company should be an AI company or is an AI company. We feel like the synthetic-biology part of our work is really interesting, so we don't always lead with AI. But without AI, we would not be able to do anything that we're doing.

I want you to think about this. What Ben is building inside of Colossal is a platform and an engine for creating living products—being able to design using AI and then build living products. Let's talk about the work you're doing in de-extinction.

We thought that if we were going to build this end-to-end pipeline for synthetic biology, we would have to develop technologies across computational biology, cellular engineering, genetic engineering, cloning, somatic cell nuclear transfer, and eventually artificial wombs. If we were going to do that and build this end-to-end platform, what's the best way to do it?

We thought, well, if you start with de-extinction, we're facing a massive extinction crisis right now. If we did that, we were going to have to solve some of the hardest problems in biology: genotype-to-phenotype relationships, ancestral-state reconstructions, and comparative genomics.

There are so many things that we have to solve. That allows us to build a systems model that could be applied to all types of solutions for biological products. Our first biological-products company spun out, which was Breaking, our plastic-degradation company. The same system that can bring you a mammoth can also make microbes that can break the chemical bonds of plastics.

So, Colossal is a parent company that's spinning out a dozen companies, each of which has massive potential. We'll talk about a couple of them here. A couple of them are super top secret, and we can't discuss them, but they're as big or bigger.

Breaking is one. You guys all know the microplastic issue, right? We have about 5 grams of plastic in our brains, the size of a plastic teaspoon or a credit card. Most of that—90%—is absorbed through your gut. Some of it comes through your skin and such. What Breaking has done is—what?

We originally thought that they had discovered an enzyme from a microbe. But after further analysis, we took this discovery at the Wyss Institute, put it in Colossal, and started to really understand it. It's actually a consortium of microbes working together, which was even better for us because we were able to essentially understand the enzymes that were being made.

We're also understanding the ability to edit each one of the microbes to make different variants of the enzymes to hit different types of plastics. The plastic crisis that we're in is terrible—not only for human healthcare, but for the oceans and many parts of the environment. It's now affecting all of these areas.

What's interesting is that most plastic-treatment and degradation companies are just making smaller plastics. They're just making smaller microplastics, and that's not solving the problem in any capacity. If we just made a company that made smaller plastics, we didn't think that was the right thing. If we just found or designed a company where the chemical process to pretreat the plastic was worse than the plastic, that was also a bad thing.

What's interesting about this discovery is that it actually breaks the chemical bonds of the plastic. We were able to use directed evolution and supercharge it using our pipeline and some of our editing tools, so that not only does it have a broader range of plastics it can break down, but it also breaks them down at a much faster rate per surface area. We're starting to look at the human body.

I find this fascinating. Imagine a supplement you could take that actually breaks down the bonds of the microplastics in your gut before they get absorbed.

Yeah, because the plastic problem is a global problem. It's not just a problem in the environment; it's in our food supply and our reproductive tissues. In some cases, it crosses the blood-brain barrier. It is a pretty big existential problem that we have to solve.

You're not going to have one solution to rule them all. You've got to have a myriad of different solutions. That's really the goal of Breaking: How do we break down and get rid of plastics in the world?

How many species are you working on bringing back?

Publicly, we've announced the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the moa. We've also created the dire wolves. We'll have more dire wolves coming, which we haven't announced.

By the way, let's get the images in the back over here. Here's the woolly mammoth mice. How cute they are.

Yeah, they are objectively the cutest mice.

And the woolly mammoth. Yep. Those are the good ones. And the dire wolf.

Yeah. That's Romulus in the front and Remus in the back. And that's George R.R. Martin, which is great.

That was actually one of the fun things. There's a lot of cool stuff that we get to work on. One of the cool things is that I think kids of all ages, whether you're 3 or older, can appreciate it. We did a Zoom with George R.R. Martin, and we got introduced to him. Obviously, if you don't know George R.R. Martin, he wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, which became Game of Thrones and popularized dire wolves.

Most people thought dire wolves were just mythical creatures, including some members of the Game of Thrones cast, whom I won't call out. But they did. What's interesting, though, is that when we got introduced to George and put him on Zoom, I just said, “Let me show you something.” I showed it to him, and he just teared up. He said, “This is like—” He knew exactly what it was, right? He knew it wasn't a mythical creature.

It was a pretty cool thing to show that we could take a 73,000-year-old skull and make puppies. We did it in 18 months, which is pretty remarkable.

It's extraordinary. I didn't think of the de-extinction business as a massive revenue opportunity when I began.

What’s the business case in this? And how big is it? I mean, EY did an estimate of the size of the market for you. Can you say?

They said that through educational content, changing STEM-related content in education, and looking at the ancillary effects, there’s a significant opportunity. These would be net-new dollars. They wouldn’t be taking away from anything. About 12.5% of global consumers buy something related to an extinct species every year. That turns out to be about $1.7 trillion, which is really interesting.

Part of our model and thought process around the de-extinction work is not only to subsidize the platform, but also to help countries do it. We’re helping them preserve their species, which is actually quite a lucrative business model, as well as helping from an educational perspective. So far, the feedback has been phenomenal.

So, just to land that plane, you came back a month ago from Dubai and announced a few major deals there. Can you say what those were?

Yes, we announced the world’s first biovault. There isn’t an equivalent of a biovault for animals like there is for plants. You’ve got a lot of fragmentation, with incredible people, nonprofits, zoos, and others working on biobanking—meaning they’re saving individual pieces of cells and whatnot.

When I naively started this business, I came from software, so I thought, “We’ll just plug into the GCP of species,” which doesn’t exist. We had to build reference genomes for every single species that we work on, and then we said this should be more of a global project. Individual countries should have stakeholdership in it.

So, we partnered with the UAE as our first partner. There’s incredibly diverse fauna in the region, much of which is going extinct, so we need to protect it. We also need to sequence it, build digital backups, and ensure that the data is shared with the global scientific community. That should be subsidized by governments, right?

I think we did a good job over about a year educating them on the importance of biodiversity: why you need to protect it, why it’s so important for national pride and technology, and the impacts of the data from these animals. You should do it because you like ecosystems. If you don’t like ecosystems, you should do it because you like animals. If you don’t like animals, you should do it because the applications could be helpful to humans. If you don’t like humans, then you’re probably not the right fit for us to talk to.

Fundamentally, we got them to agree to put hundreds of millions of dollars into the world’s first biovaults. Instead of doing it in some secret back room, cave, or underground facility, there can still be redundancy models around that, but it can also be done in a high-traffic area. If you’re going to spend X dollars, spend X plus Y and wrap educational content around it. Make it available for kids and whatnot, which they did and agreed to, which is great.

From that, we’re building a living lab. It’s a 9-figure initiative for us and a 9-figure initiative for the country. It also builds capabilities in-country for countries to protect their biodiversity in a completely new way while sharing the data globally.

So, the way I think about this is that countries are your customers for saving their endangered species.

Mm-hmm.

And eventually, it’ll be productionized—like, once we are successful with artificial wombs. The other thing you’re doing besides de-extinction is giving birth, excuse the pun, to an artificial womb company, so that these mammals and birds can actually give birth ex utero. Imagine a future in which—and speak about it—you have 3 of these projects going on.

Yeah, so we have 3. They don’t work yet. We have 3 mini-moonshots that are big moonshots, right, of artificial wombs for different animal clades.

Our vision is that, using biobanking, synthetic biology, automation, robotic process automation, assistance from AI and computer vision, and artificial wombs, we could productionize species development. When you have small populations and a genetic bottleneck around a certain species, or you have long gestations, like with the northern white rhino, this could be incredibly useful.

Everyone knows about the northern white rhino, right? At least, a lot of people know about it. There are 2 females left. They’re functionally extinct, and there’s low diversity in them. There’s a bottleneck because they’re related, and their 18 embryos are related.

But if you can engineer in genetic diversity, both synthetically and from lost specimens, and then productionize it through artificial wombs, the $25 million that people are spending a year keeping 2 animals alive could be used in part to productionize it. The rest could go to water, education, and other things for the country.

I really do think that productionizing endangered species, and also helping species adapt at the same curve at which we are changing environments, is going to be needed in the future. Evolution is not fast unless it’s directed.

You also purchased the world’s top 2 cloning companies. I love that. You forget that—you just happened to buy that.

Most people think of cloning and they’re like, “I think I’ve read something about a celebrity cloning their dog,” right? We did clone Tom Brady’s dog, so I think we’re part of that. Tom Brady is an investor, along with—

We do kind of push that narrative to people because it’s true, so I guess we’re part of the problem when people think about it. But what’s interesting is that only about 18 species have ever been cloned, and 15 of those have been cloned by ViaGen, the main company that we bought. We bought another one as well.

Most cloning efficiency is only about 2%, and ViaGen’s was at 78% pretty consistently, which is amazing. The only endangered species that have ever been cloned on the planet were cloned by ViaGen. Things like the black-footed ferret, which are going extinct, had old cells that ViaGen was able to reanimate and then clone.

People still love their dogs. There’s nothing negative about dog cloning. I get asked if I would clone my dogs. They’re mutts, so I’d probably save more, but maybe I’d clone them because I love them.

We’re not taking away the cloning business for consumers. People love that business, and it’s a profitable business. We’re still supporting that business. Separately, we’re now taking those technologies into countries and helping not just productionize cloning of critically endangered species with artificial wombs, but productionize cloning itself. We have some big announcements to share with the local government on that.

Okay. I want you to think about the pipeline—the platform that Colossal is able to use AI and synthetic biology to say, “We want this phenotype, these genes, these gene copies.” I was in a conversation with one of your scientists who said, “Yes, we’re going to a tusk conference,” right? I was like, “What?”

It’s about being able to understand, “Okay, we want the snout to be longer, we want the teeth to be longer,” and being able to use AI to change which genes and which enhancer sequences, and to design the living animal that you want. Which is why I said, when someone asked you, “Could you create Pikachu?” you said, “Yeah, we could probably create Pikachu.”

I did get asked that. I got asked that as the first question at South by Southwest a few years ago, and then the rest of the entire panel was about Pokémon. I was really hopeful to talk about our vaccine development for elephants and others, but it was mostly about Pokémon.

Oh my God.

Yeah. But what I find fascinating is that if you can engineer life that way, the companies being built and spun out include a company that can create disease-resistant plants or drought-resistant plants.

Disease-resistant animals.

Or we’re spending a lot of time on it because leading extinction drivers are not just human-caused, but some of them are supercharged by humans—for example, diseases that exist in nature.

A project that I’m very passionate about and that we’re working on is chytrid. Most people have never heard of chytrid. It’s the leading extinction driver on the planet right now in frogs and amphibians. They’re not fluffy, so they don’t get as much attention, but it’s terrible for ecosystems, and it’s something that we can solve with genetic engineering, right?

For us, we can solve the current problem, but we can also create chytrid-resistant frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians, which have huge applications.

Same thing. We're not currently working on corals. After dinosaurs, it's like dinosaurs, corals, and then, I guess, Pokémon. Dinosaurs, corals, dragons, Pokémon. Everyone's really excited about dragons.

We aren't working on dragons, and we're not working on Pokémon or corals yet. We get a lot of requests. But the coral side is really fascinating, and it applies directly to this idea of animals and plants.

We have an entire group now that's focusing on how to apply some of the things we've learned from livestock to critically endangered species. What are the biggest issues? What are the commonalities around these vaccines? What are the commonalities around what can be developed to confer resistance?

Part of it's also amazing because most people think about Colossal and only think about the mammoth and de-extinction. They don't think about the platform, like you've talked about, which I'm really appreciative that someone's talking about—the larger synthetic platform and biosystem that we're building.

People also don't really think about what the ripple effects on society are. We don't want to live in a non-biodiverse ecosystem or environment. We don't want to live in a world where we are changing it faster than nature can catch up.

I think that synthetic biology, especially paired with AI, will be—and I'm sure others in other industries will disagree with this—the most transformative technology humanity has ever had.

Yeah, you think of AI as a multitrillion-dollar, $100 trillion market.

That's why I think we're massively undervalued.

Yeah, synthetic biology enabled and powered by AI is as big and diverse a market. How big is the market for engineering disease-resistant plants, drought-resistant plants, and animals?

I mean, it's hundreds of billions today, and it's just not well tracked, right? If you look at everything that can be applied and what the current rate is, you have a terrible swine flu or bird flu or whatnot that wipes out a population. You've got so many precautions that also go into these, right?

When we brought back the dire wolves, we got some feedback that was like, "Oh, people don't like wolves because they're going to go kill the cattle." I was like, "The way we raise cattle, the wolves aren't going near it. It's gross." And it just is. It just factually is. It's gross.

What's interesting, though, is that I think we do that because of how we've had inbreeding and hybridization and all this over time. I think that if we're smarter about this, we also have the opportunity to educate governments on things like GMOs.

For a while, there was this anti-GMO, or genetically modified organism, movement, right? People thought, "Oh, it's going to change your genome, and if you eat GMO corn, you're going to..." I don't know what they thought. I had this conversation with Rob on Zoom earlier today that GMOs have saved so many lives. They've taken no lives.

But it's an educational moment. There was a season when seat belts were scary for people, right? There was literally a time when cars were like, "No, we can't put seat belts in cars because it's going to make people think cars are bad or that cars are dangerous." Well, cars are dangerous, right? It's an opportunity to educate.

We get that. When we were meeting with the Australian government about reintroducing the Tasmanian tiger, under their law, Tasmanian tigers are technically GMOs. They are genetically modified organisms, even if they're 100% genetically identical.

They're an amalgamation of 53 different Tasmanian tigers over the course of about 300 years. What's interesting about that is that they're still GMOs. For us, we then had to educate the Australian government that you can't just have an anti-GMO narrative as it relates to the Tasmanian tiger, because then you can't rewild this incredible species back into your country if you see it as what you were afraid of in the '80s.

There's another, dare I say, multitrillion-dollar market you're working on: gene drives.

Oh, yeah. Once again, gene drives are a 40% technology problem and a 60% marketing problem.

Yeah. Can you describe what it is, who the customer is, and how big it is?

The invasive species problem is a global problem. It's about $5.4 trillion as currently measured. I think it's much larger than that because I don't think it's easy to truly quantify.

As the world gets smaller from a commerce perspective, invasive species are just more prevalent, right? That's everything from what we're seeing in Australia with the cane toad and cats, even carp in Australia. Invasive carp—and that sounds weird. I don't know who put them there, but they shouldn't be there.

People talk about mosquitoes, but what we're seeing right now in the U.S., and what is becoming a big problem in the U.S.—Texas has just declared it a national emergency—is the screwworm. It's coming up through Honduras and Mexico, and it's now in southern Texas. It's going to decimate our cattle and bison industry.

How do you combat that? You have a couple of choices. You can create vaccines and try to do different things to the animals themselves, but then that goes directly into the USDA, and you've got to work through that. There's still some anti-GMO movement from an education perspective.

Separately, there's the idea that you could create genetically modified screwworms and release them so that, as the next generations are produced, they're all male. Over time, no matter how much they love each other, they're not going to make more. They don't have the same technologies that humanity has, like opposable thumbs, so they die out.

People are killing animals because they're invasive species. In New Zealand, Australia, and parts of Africa, they're killing cats and possums because they're decimating their local populations of small mammals or marsupials in Australia, or birds in New Zealand.

That's an animal welfare nightmare. That's a social nightmare. Who wants to be in that position? People care more about cats than screwworms.

If you engineer the right gene drives into them and create the right biocontrol around them, you can have animals, including insects, live out their normal lives. Then, over time, you have a humane decrease in that population.

People released gene drives in Africa around mosquitoes, and everyone freaked out. Then they stopped it because they thought, "Oh no, it's bad." Mosquitoes are a part of the food web. I don't think it was necessarily a bad idea to stop it because they were part of the food web.

But we know invasive species are not a part of the food web, because of the word "invasive." It's a huge problem. We're working with our government and with international governments on it.

That's the magic of AI combined with synthetic biology. Two years ago, if you had asked, "Should you be working on biocontrol, biocontainment, and gene drives?" I would have said that I didn't really get into it because I would have thought it didn't really work when it was dispersed around mosquitoes.

Now it's a $5 trillion problem, right? We have an interesting model for it and some proprietary technologies that make it safer than what has ever been dispersed in the wild. We also have the ability to roll it back, which is helpful.

How big is that marketplace? How big is the spend on going after invasive species?

The U.S. is over $500 billion a year in economic impact, just domestically. I don't know off the top of my head what the spend against it is, because the way that it's mostly combated is with everything from poisons—literally poisons. They literally poison the environment as a way to get rid of the invasive species.

It's like archaic ways of treating cancer versus what we know is here and what's coming. It's the same thing people are doing with the environment. For specifically larger animals, they're killing them, poisoning them, and trapping them. It's pretty inhumane.

I just want you to understand how huge this opportunity is. There are dozens of species to be addressed.

Not enough people are focusing on it. The good news is that people are really focusing on compute power, AI, anthropomorphic robots, and other areas, which is great.

Still, if you ask 90% of people who are fluent in synthetic biology and think about genome engineering, I'd say 99% of them focus only on human health care, which is great. But the same technologies applied to other use cases, I think, are even larger economically and also have a bigger opportunity to help us.

You're focused on creating healthier embryos, reinventing IVF, and advanced gene-editing technologies.

These are all sort of spin-outs that are coming out of this engine that you've created.

Yeah. Our artificial wombs don't work yet—full disclosure. We have 3 projects around that. But what we found is that, as you break some of these problems down from a first-principles perspective and look at how you would rethink them and where you would start, what's interesting is that I've got kids now, and they're great.

We went through the IVF process, and it's a little weird and crazy. It's archaic and emotional. This thing that's so precious gets evaluated using an archaic grading scale—a morphological grading scale—and that's how we're choosing these things. It's crazy, right? I think it's crazy. I think it's very archaic versus where technology currently is.

For us to be successful, even long term, with our mammalian-based artificial wombs, there are about 9 different placental types. There are 4 core, but 9 different core placental types. We have to innovate in a couple of different categories, and one of those is just keeping embryos healthier longer.

If you look at how current modern-day IVF clinics work, they've been doing it the same way for a long time. What's interesting is that, if you look at the data, it's based on this morphological grade. What we found is that sometimes embryos that are day 2, day 3, or day 5 in non-model species—and in some model species, like mice—don't look like they would be the winner of the race morphologically at the stage when most humans make their decision.

But if you go a little bit longer, they actually are the healthiest embryo, which is kind of crazy, right? We as humans are making this decision on probably one of the most important things in our lives, if you go through IVF, with this archaic old system based on one moment in time and, to say the least, bad imaging.

That's what we do. But what we found is that things will speed up and slow down at these different stages. Even for us to be successful with an artificial womb, we had to build a hydrogel and microfluidic device that actually makes the embryos healthier.

We've been able to take embryos in non-model species much further than anyone else has in the world, both in mice and in non-model species. It's a lot easier to do it in humans. We don't do it in humans, but that same technology could be applied to human embryos.

We have a slightly different grading scale that's proving to be way more efficient and, more importantly, way more accurate in both model and non-model species. That little innovation alone could be pretty transformative to IVF.

You know, Ben, I want to take us to close here, but give me a sense of how fast this field is moving. What transformations have you experienced over the last year or 2? As far as I know, there's no other company out there that's even close to what you've built in terms of production pipeline.

Yes. Obviously, I'm biased—full disclosure. But I will say objectively, 2 or 3 years ago, we were doing victory laps when we made a couple of edits. I think that's where most people are. We were getting about 40% efficiency, and we thought, “That's pretty good. Most people are doing 15%. We're really smart.”

Now we're doing hundreds of edits at 90% efficiency. I think in the coming years, that's going to be thousands of edits. Those are not linear repeats, meaning they're all over the genome. They're completely different, and they're very precise—to the point that I would feel comfortable that the technology could be applied to human healthcare.

We're not going to do it. We'd spin it out or license it, because we are pretty myopically focused on biodiversity and de-extinction at the core. But no one's near that. No one's even near that.

Even 2 years ago, we thought we were by far the best based on every single standard, which was interesting. I will say that what we're finding from DNA synthesis is that, at least from what we've seen—unless they're secret, we haven't seen anything else based on the research and what we publish—we've surpassed the largest delivery by 5× already.

I think we'll be at 20× before the end of this year. The DNA synthesis, large-scale delivery, and clustering models that we have are all superior. At the same time, I think part of the reason for that is because we've taken a product-and-systems-model approach to synthetic biology, leveraging AI.

Most people are trying to solve one-off point solutions for human healthcare, so they have different goals. I can understand why they have different ambition levels. But for us to understand genotype-to-phenotype expression and be able to do it all over the genome, it's just a different set of challenges.

I do think in the coming years that, hopefully, the models we're applying and the way we're thinking about it will apply more broadly to synthetic biology.

You're taking these capabilities and spinning out companies.

We want to stay very focused. We're opportunistic and capitalist, but at the same time, we think some of these problems are very hard, and we want dedicated teams on them.

De-extinction and species preservation—we think it's a $10 trillion opportunity, but we also think it's one of the most important things to focus on. We think we're solving the hardest things in biology. But if we say, “We got a great discovery on plastics, and we can spend some resources on it,” then we invent that here and spin it out.

We put incredible women and men to work on it, and then we bring in the right capital and attention. It's part of the ecosystem. We build intercompany agreements where we share the editing efficiencies and whatnot that we develop, so it can help them.

It's a really interesting ecosystem in terms of how we approach this. Fundamentally, I don't ever want to spread ourselves too thin. I want to focus on the platform, focus on biodiversity and de-extinction, and then bring in women and men who can go run those companies.

They're typically seeded by us with the scientific team internally that built the technology.