拯救人类竞速：走进120亿美元 Colossal Biosciences与38亿美元 Astromech

It’s currently forecast that we’re going to lose up to 50% of all biodiversity in the next 25 years. So that’s dark.

These are some of our woolly mice.

Woolly mouse. Colossus woolly mouse. They’ve begun an experiment in their plan to revive the woolly mammoth.

It’s a good mouse. And the way the world is right now, let us have this.

We had 100% healthy mice born with exactly the predicted phenotypes, with the most multiplex edits delivered at one time ever, and we did it in 30 days.

So, the last one was $400 million. You’ve raised $630 million in total.

Yeah, $635 million total. The last round was supposed to be $200 million, and it got oversubscribed to $400 million. We’re just getting started. I’m sure we’ll raise more capital.

One of our companies that we spun out is called Astromec. It’s using AI to build—it’s a very focused model. We do get requests for a megalodon quite a bit. We’re not working on that. There’s no secret U.S. Navy–Anduril mashup.

1. Inside Colossal's De-Extinction Lab

Ben Lamm, welcome to Sorcery.

Welcome to Colossal.

Thank you. This place is insane.

Yeah, it’s funny. Just wait until you go through the tour—it gets crazier.

We have something pretty nuts over here. Do you want to show us what’s going on?

So, believe it or not, we do not have 330-pound, massive, extinct Pleistocene wolves here. So, we built an animatronic of one, and that actually is the size of Reheis, probably the most famous of our dire wolves. He was on the cover of Time.

We constantly have footage from the last 6 months that we project here. We thought that most people, when they come here, want to see them. They’re like, “Oh, can we see the dire wolves?” We’re like, “We’re in Texas. Where do you think we have them? You’re in an office building, right?”

So much of what we do is around inspiration and kids, because value creation, impact, and inspiration are our big core values that we try to think through in all of our decisions. Even thinking about trophic downgrading and the cascading effect that happens with wolves—the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone and what that looks like, and why predators are important—we’ve tried to think about, with our long-term museum partners, how we start to educate the public on the importance of keystone species, and specifically predators.

This is our dire wolf installation. We can thank Wētā Workshop from New Zealand. If you’re a fan of Peter Jackson, you’ll know those guys. And, yeah, that’s actually Romulus chewing on something disgusting. I don’t know if every single office you’ve been to has animatronic dire wolves.

No, I have not seen any animatronics.

I’m sure there’ll be some crazy conspiracy based on that: “All the dire wolves are robots. They’re really a robotics company.” We get lots of interesting feedback.

I have confirmed, after going into the avian lab, that the birds are real.

Yeah, birds are real. And the stuff we’re doing is real, so it’s kind of fun.

Okay, so you want to show us around what you have in the lobby area, and then you can explain what’s behind the closed doors?

This is 55,000 square feet. We have another 30,000 square feet of lab space. Everything wraps around the lab, which you’re going to get to go deep in, which is exciting. All the offices, conference rooms, everything—all of our AI teams—wrap around the lab because the science is the heart of what we do here.

This was also made by Wētā. Most people think this is what we do, but as you spend time in the lab, you’ll see it’s way weirder, grosser, and more technical. Most people ask, “Why don’t you have a mammoth? Why don’t you have a dinosaur? Why can’t you just take frozen core samples and clone them?” But those tissues are dead. You cannot clone from dead cells.

We put this here because this is what most people think we do. When we launched, every cover was something like this—a mammoth preserved in ice. Just so you know, they look nothing like this, really. They’re disgusting, and the smell is awful. Even the permafrost—you can’t get it out of your pores forever.

Yeah, so I’ve spent a bunch of time up in Alaska, in the permafrost caves in northern Alaska, in the Arctic Circle, and it’s just—I mean, it just gets in you, and it’s disgusting.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah. But you could just pretend it looks like that, and it smells like this, and it’s incredible. It does have its own signature scent.

I think we have the coolest streetwear that no one can get. It’s science streetwear. It’s super awesome.

Everybody’s wearing it, too. You guys have great merch.

Yeah, but we don’t sell it. It’s only available to our employees and our favorite guests. We want to provide the greatest apparel. It’s not swag; it is apparel.

2. Every wall in this lab has a purpose

Everything that you see, when you go into the lab, is designed to provide all of these different educational moments that talk about our core values or explain something specific to that unique lab. We have a core lab that’s an open lab, and then we have individual labs off the core lab. This is one of our production labs and whatnot.

Sharing our core values and reminding people what they do is great, but the other thing we’ve done is try to pick technologies that are useful. On the other side—and you’ll see this in the lab—you actually can’t see any of this. This is one-way projection. It’s not a projector; it’s actually one-way nanofilm.

So, we can see it, but it’s not distracting. When you’re going to lunch, going to a meeting, or going to the bathroom, you’re consistently reminded of the things that matter and the things that we take pride in. But when you’re working in the lab, it’s not distracting.

3. The AI idea that could save the planet

Ben, I have to ask you: What is your hottest take right now?

My hottest take right now is that I think AI is going to converge, and we are going to build a digital twin of nature. Just like we have prediction models for everything from missile defense to tsunamis and earthquakes, we’re going to have that for nature, and we’re going to understand in real time how nature is affected by every decision that we make. That’s going to be incredibly enlightening and terrifyingly scary.

But I think we’re going to build a digital twin of nature as humanity, where we will be able to truly understand the consequences of our decisions. Then we’ll be able to leverage technologies like what we have to productionize species to combat some of the adverse effects of those decisions.

So why is that so important? You study de-extinction.

It’s so important to me because, ultimately, we don’t really know how everything works. We as humanity are like, “Oh, when people get locked in their houses for COVID, all of a sudden there are dolphins back in Italy.” But it’s like, why?

For us, thinking through and understanding the ramifications of that—thinking through how that affects things like water purity and scarcity and food security—all of these things are directly impacted by the ecosystem, and that’s also driven by the flora and fauna that are there.

If we don’t understand the ripple effects of either eradicating a species, building an XYZ data center, or diverting a river, then we don’t understand what that means to us, even in terms of our survivability in the face of a new zoonotic disease that arises, or food and water security.

4. What Colossal is building next

I think understanding a digital twin of nature, so that we can pick and choose the trade-offs as a society, is going to be critical to our long-term success. I see a world where all these systems, including AI, actually make it so that we’re better aligned with nature.

What are you looking forward to most in the next 12 months?

The next 12 months? I’m looking forward to Colossal potentially having the next extinct species birthed.

What is that going to be?

I’m not saying.

Okay. To be continued.

To be continued.

Thank you, Ben.

Yeah, thank you.

5. Revealing Colossal's woolly mice

Okay, Ben, we just came from the lobby, I guess. We have something special in the room with us today. We actually have something in the room with us.

Yes.

So, what are we about to reveal under the curtain?

Yes. These are some of our woolly mice. These are some of our Gen 2 mice from our successful woolly mouse project, which I think is objectively the cutest mouse on the planet. These are offspring from that first generation.

They’re probably not as famous as Chip and Dale were, but their offspring are, as you’re going to see, objectively as cute. These are the second-most genetically modified multicellular organisms on the planet, after our dire wolves. Do you want to take it off?

Let’s do it.

Thank you.

Oh my God.

Yeah, so, like I said, objectively pretty cute.

These mice, along our process to bring back the mammoth—you know, it takes 22 months to gestate an elephant, and elephants are endangered—you want to be very thoughtful in that whole process. With these mice, what’s great about 21- to 22-day gestation is that you can actually test a lot of those core phenotypes, or physical attributes, in the editing.

What was great about the first generation of the mice is that we made them in 30 days. That got lost in the shuffle, which blew me away. We had 100% healthy mice born with exactly the predicted phenotypes, with the most multiplex edits delivered at one time ever. And we did it in 30 days.

The 30-day part got lost when we announced the woolly mice because everyone was just talking about how objectively cute they were. But nobody really realized that it was all done in 30 days, which is amazing, right? We took all of these edits that we had been identifying for the woolly mammoth, identified the mouse equivalent of those, and then engineered them in 30 days and birthed mice, right? That’s crazy.

It showed that our end-to-end pipeline worked. It broke the internet. A bunch of people talked about it online and talked about how cute they were, and it was a testament to the fact that the prediction of the exact edits in the mouse equivalent of those edits worked, which was amazing.

6. Wild requests they get every day

That’s crazy. And so I heard you guys have some super fans now. You have to keep everything under lock and key.

Yeah.

Did you expect that?

So, our offices aren’t open to the general public, but we had people who just showed up very excited about the mice, which then made us even more concerned about the dire wolves. As you know, we don’t have dire wolves physically here, because you would have seen them.

There’s one in the lobby.

An animatronic one, right? Because people come and they’re like, “But where are they?” That’s why we have that huge, 60-foot screen showing very early footage. We’re probably actually going to make that screen a real-time feed so you can just see them in real time.

Until we had the camera system working in high definition, we were just putting that loop on. Then we have the animatronic up there so people could at least see the scale and the size, and we wanted to make something that was Instagrammable when people showed up, right?

Having giant, 130-pound Pleistocene wolves in our Texas offices was probably a bad idea, but these guys obviously can fit much, much better here. Then we have an 8,000-square-foot vivarium that they all live in day to day.

It is exciting, and people got very excited about the woolly mice. We had to nicely remind people that we are not open to the general public, so you have to see everything on YouTube or the podcast. We don’t invite people in often.

And people have—I’m sure you’ve gotten many requests for people to buy them.

Oh, we get a request every day. There were people who actually made “legalized woolly mice” T-shirts on Etsy, which is weird because they’re not illegal. And then the crazy scientist in China who did the CRISPR babies posted that they were bioweapons.

What?

I know. We got so many crazy things. We had people who bought woolly mice pillows, and all kinds of bootleg, crazy rip-off products came out of it. Even the Smithsonian reached out to us and said, “Hey, look—”

They’re mice. Eventually, they’re going to die. Could we—I mean, they were being realistic, because mice don’t have 40-year lifespans, right? They were like, “Could we taxidermy them and put them on display when they die?”

If you go to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, you actually have that. We’ve had a lot of weird requests, but we do get schools, museums, and a lot of people asking to see them and asking us to donate them and take care of them.

We’re not in the selling-animals business, so it’s not currently a part of our roadmap.

Are you going to give them to the Smithsonian?

I don’t know. We haven’t made any formal commitments.

7. Colossal's business model

So, if selling animals is not the business model, what is the business model? I mean, the technology in these guys, I would argue, is probably the most revolutionary technology ever. There’s a new term—we were in an article recently—and we did not invent this, but there’s a new term called civilization tech. Have you heard this, or civ tech?

Yeah. It’s, like, I think the hot new thing.

You create a new category.

No, no, we did not. We’re not—we’re in it, right? Anthropic was in it. I think it’s the evolution of the moonshot category, right? Now that Elon is going to put a whole base on the moon and then Mars, I guess we can’t call moonshots moonshots anymore.

I think this is a new category of technologies that have an application broader than their services or products for the market, but have a bigger ripple effect on tech, on humanity. I think genome engineering at scale, full DNA synthesis at scale, and artificial wombs at scale have an application that’s insane.

When we were at the conference where we met, we had just done our capital raise, our last capital round, and people were like, “Yeah, this is a very big round for a company this early.” They made some comment, and I said, “Yeah, I do think that we are one of the most undervalued companies in the world,” because I truly do.

8. How Colossal raised $635 million

The ability to preserve, engineer, and direct life on a planetary scale, in all species, I think is a pretty important skill set for humanity.

That’s a really interesting point, though, on the size of your fundraises. The last one was $400 million. You’ve raised $635 million in total.

Yeah, $635 million total. The last round was supposed to be $200 million, and it got oversubscribed to $400 million.

Not bad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we’re just getting started. I’m sure we’ll raise more capital.

On that point, though, I was listening to a few of your podcasts ahead of this that you’ve done. You’ve done so many great ones, but what I think is underrated is what you use that capital for. It’s not just the lab, but it’s the preserve, it’s the reserve—

Yeah. A lot of it goes into the halo effect of it. The effects are amazing. What’s interesting is we don’t know what we don’t know, even about the business model.

We know for a fact that there are government use cases around preserving life and building applications to different problem sets, like invasive species. Invasive species is a half-trillion-dollar problem globally. It’s huge, right?

Think about rats on islands. Think about the screwworm here in Texas, which is going to decimate the cattle industry. It’s terrible. It’s awful. Our choices are that beef prices go through the roof, we inoculate our cows—which a lot of people don’t want to do—or we attack the invasive species.

The best way to do that is a gene drive. It’s engineering in a safe protocol that then goes through the population and makes them sterile so that there are no future generations. If you are an animal-welfare person around insects, which is great—there are those people—this is a good solution for you, because we’re not out there spraying.

Right now, people are spraying chemicals. It’s very, very bad. The same thing is happening with Lyme disease and ticks in the Northeast, right? People are literally poisoning the environment and poisoning other animals and plants to get rid of ticks because of all the negative effects. It’s killing the moose population. It’s killing deer. It’s affecting people with Lyme disease.

There are all these huge problems around invasive species that we as humans cause. Using gene drives in biocontrol and biocontainment technologies to do that is hundreds of billions of dollars, right? Most people don’t realize that when they think about de-extinction.

Also, the technologies that we’re developing that have applications to human health care are insane, whether it’s individual pieces of the artificial womb for IVF and embryo health, or even going as far as being able to germline-edit out certain disease states for genetic diseases and disorders. Colossal is the world leader in that.

Those are things that we know, but we didn’t even know that 3 years ago. In the last few years, or a few months, we’ve had people come to us. There’s a particular type of fabric that comes from a particular type of animal that’s ethically harvested, but they literally buy billions of dollars’ worth of it from this country.

They came to us and said, “Hey, look, we need to increase this by 6×, and there’s just not enough of these animals, right? We’re going to keep buying from this, but how do we also do 5× more here domestically?”

We own the rights to the animals. Can we clone these animals? Can we even productionize it where it’s like lab-grown meat? I don’t know if you saw this in the lab, but we actually have hair follicles growing, and we’ve taken elephant stem cells and created follicles so that we can grow mammoth hair.

What if you did plates and plates of that and full warehouses of growing this without even touching the animals, right? It’s like the lab-grown equivalent of hair, which is kind of weird and cool. We’re the only company to do that, and they are buying billions of dollars’ worth of this and want to 5× it, and there’s just not that much available.

About 3 months ago, we didn't know about that, and now we're working on coming up with a solution to help them solve that. We've also had an extinct bird, or semi-extinct bird, and a critically endangered bird that a lot of the Middle East wants to help bring back because it's important to their falconry and culture. So they've come to us and said, “Look, this is billions of dollars in terms of research and conservation that we've spent, and we just haven't been successful with our artificial eggs and other technologies. We could help productionize that,” right?

These are the types of use cases that, once people understand the capability sets of artificial wombs for mammals and avians, all the way through genome engineering and computational analysis, create all these unique opportunities where people say, “Could you solve my problem with biology or genome engineering or artificial limbs?” And so the plethora of opportunities we have is interesting. I think the hardest thing that we will continue to have is making sure that we stay focused on our core mission and don't deviate too much for some of these large economic opportunities.

9. How AI is converging with Biotech

I'm sure you're going to get inundated with more, especially because of AI. We haven't done many biotech interviews, but now, because AI is really converging with biotech, it's exploding.

It is truly exploding, right? You're going to see this pre-Cambrian explosion of new drugs and new therapies that all come from AI-assisted drug design and discovery. One of our companies that we spun out, called Astromec, which raised money recently and may or may not be raising money now, soonish—this is going to sound crazy—is a different way of looking at drugs. It's using AI to build a very focused model.

It doesn't need the breadth that a lot of these other models need, right? We don't have to go build a $500-billion data center in computing power. We don't have to fight for water and other things that people are all upset about. We can be very, very focused, but it's looking at evolutionary trends to understand why, over evolutionary time, certain animals have certain conserved regions of the genome that prevent things like cancer.

If you look at a protein like p53 in elephants, elephants get cancer at about a rate of 2% to 3%; humans are about 24% to 25%. They do that because that cancer suppression comes from an overexpression of p53, right? We have the largest dataset on elephants in the entire world. We actually have the largest dataset of multiple species of herpesviruses, because EEHV is a herpesvirus that kills elephants, right?

When you start to look at why certain species have invulnerabilities to certain disease states that affect human health care, we can track that evolutionary trend over time and even build, if you look at some of the prediction models out there, a prediction model that can be applicable not only to cancer evolution but also to things like bird flu and other things. What's really interesting is that, while AI is critical to what we're doing at Colossal, none of this would be possible without AI, and a lot of the stuff that we've had to build is bespoke. We're now even applying it to the next level of drug and therapeutic design and discovery.

That's insane.

All using ancient genomes all the way through the most recent genomes, which is crazy.

10. How ancient DNA actually gets to the lab

Okay, one thing, when we were walking through—I know this is kind of maybe a nerdy thing—but I was just totally blown away by even the supply chain of everything that goes into finding the cells for these things, how they extract DNA from samples that are thousands of years, sometimes millions of years old, that kind of thing. And then also the pigeon eggs that you have.

Yeah. Yeah. We have the pigeon colony, and we have a bunch of strange things. We have a chief animal officer. We have fresh pigeons that come from our avian facility. These are things I never thought I'd have because I come from mostly traditional SaaS and software. I never thought I'd have any of these roles. We have an incredible team that takes care of things like woolly mice, right? These are things that we didn't have.

But there is so much, and I think that's the value that we've built. We try to look at this from a vertical integration, first-principles perspective. We had to own the entire stack, right? So that's why, when we were looking at expanding our endangered species production, our biobanking and BioVault initiative, and our global network that we've been rolling out, buying ViaGen made a lot of sense, right?

When you look at animal cloning, for most people, it's dogs, cats, and horses. But there were 2 companies: ViaGen in the U.S. and a company in South Korea, so there were really 2. ViaGen had cloning efficiencies at 80%, where most people are at 2%, right? So it made sense for us to say, “Okay, we need to buy them and bolt them on” from a vertical integration perspective.

So much of the supply chain we either built, innovated, licensed, or bought, but you got a taste of it today. We had to build it; we put the entire thing under 1 roof. I think that cross-disciplinary function of allowing people to work from everything from animal ops to ancient DNA extraction and everything in the middle makes the products go faster and better.

So we have to let our furry friends go.

I know. They only get so much time with us.

They only get so much time. The rest, you have to pay for. I'm just kidding. [Laughter] But we'll say goodbye to the little woolly mice, and then we'll just continue after that.

11. The real stats behind Mass Extinction

So, to set the stage, you started this on the premise of extinction. So what are the stats? I know this is dark.

No, it's super dark. It's dark, but I think it's hopeful, right? I'm an eternal optimist. It's currently forecasted that we're going to lose up to 50% of all biodiversity in the next 25 years. That's dark. But that's why we have to do stuff, right?

Sometimes people get confused that we think de-extinction is a replacement for modern conservation. We do not think that. But the reality is, no matter how good conservation works, it just doesn't move at the speed at which we're eradicating species and changing the planet. We're doing that. That is happening.

For us, if you have a combination of a de-extinction toolkit that has lots of other ramifications, which we've talked about some, and you get governments to invest in a global, distributed biovault network, they're at least backing up things. At least we're starting to build a backup plan. And then, lastly, we open-source all of our technologies for conservation. Anybody can use any of our technologies for free for conservation.

There are always going to be bad actors, right? You can't prevent that. That's like when—I don't even remember, maybe a decade ago—San Francisco temporarily put a moratorium on investing in facial recognition because China was doing some bad stuff, isolating populations using facial recognition. That doesn't mean facial recognition is bad. That just means people are going to use it in bad ways, right?

But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't innovate the technologies for positive use cases, right? These technologies are very, very powerful, and people are going to do all kinds of bad things, probably, with them. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't engineer them and make them so that people can do good with them. I'm an eternal optimist, so I believe that we, as a species, will ultimately do more good with them than bad.

So we're open-sourcing them to the conservation community for conservation purposes. If people use our technologies for nefarious reasons and not for conservation, then, yeah, we would probably step in and enforce that.

Straight to jail.

I don't know if we have that power, but we'd give them a lot of legal feedback.

No, that's really interesting. We were just talking when the woolly mice were here before you, and I forget her name. What's her name?

Oh, Katie.

Oh, Katie. Yeah. So, I was talking with Katie, and she was telling me how she got here. I was like, "How long have you been here?" She said she's been here for 3 years. She was at a zoo first, then she was at a clinic, and then she came over here. She was like, "Well, the conservation and preservation side of things is completely broken. There's literally no movement. Nothing's going on there. It's boring."

Sometimes it's hard, and we had a lot of negative feedback on this at the beginning. It went from negative to neutral, and now it's becoming more and more positive. But the conservation community has historically been some of the most vocal critics of the work, because I think they viewed it early on as though we had positioned ourselves as a replacement for modern conservation, which we never did.

We're like, "No, no, no. You should do conservation work. Don't give us money." We always viewed this as net-new ideas, net-new money, net-new technology, and net-new awareness, right? Most people don't know that 20% of baby elephants die because of EEHV. People should know that. If you go talk to any of our elephant conservation partners, they'll tell you that their funding has gone up since Colossal was invented.

Damn. I view it as a net positive, but in the early days, to her point, it did take some long conversations with that community, because that community is very stuck in its own ways. But if you spend time with that community and you ask them, "Are we, as a whole—as humanity as a whole—with current modern conservation techniques, winning the fight to save species?" they will all tell you no.

So, okay, we've got to do something different. We argue that 99% of people should keep doing what they are doing with conservation, and we're that 1% difference. But wouldn't you rather have a de-extinction toolkit and not need it than need a de-extinction toolkit and not have it?

Remember Star Trek, when the aliens came and they were like, "We don't have blue whales, and if we don't have the sound of a blue whale, we're going to destroy the planet"? Do you remember this? Absolutely. Old-school movie. They had to go back in time, capture a blue whale, and bring it to the future so the aliens didn't destroy us.

We don't have that exact issue currently. At least, I don't think there's a lot of UFO noise right now, so maybe they're looking for something. But ultimately, I would rather have this technology set and not need it, or at least use it in some of these interesting capacities that help individual species, inspire the next generation, and get people excited about science.

I'd rather do that and never need it for a mass-scale extinction event than have a mass-scale extinction event—which we know we're in right now, we know that's happening—and then not have these tools.

So, in practice, are you going to be releasing any of these animals, like the—

In a couple phases. Obviously, you have to work very closely with governments, Indigenous people groups, and private landowners. For our extinct species, we do want to put them back into the wild with all these collaborations in place, where they help the ecosystem. The government's supportive, and the Indigenous people groups are supportive.

We want to do that for our gene drives and whatnot. That's also highly up to the government. Right now, we're educating the USDA, the intelligence community, the Department of War, and others on these technologies and how they can combat these issues domestically and abroad. But it is up to them. They have to give us the green light.

I did an interview about the screwworm, and it went viral. Then there were 20 articles about it, and there was feedback on Bluesky, of all places. I was surprised there was negative feedback on Bluesky—the echo chamber, or liberal Twitter, you know. The feedback was, "Well, Colossal doesn't have permits." Yes, we don't have permits, but this is a technology that, if it is permitted, can eradicate this problem.

In the screwworm example, they're spending $1.5 billion in taxes, and in 8 years they're going to slow or stop the problem. Our solution, which is already made, could eradicate the entire problem in every model that we've done in 6 to 7 months.

So, we could save a decade and billions of dollars for taxpayers, as well as spare the animals that are going to go through this painful death from the screwworm. If you're a beef person, the price of beef is going to stay low. If you're an animal welfare person, these animals are not going to be in pain from this terrible infectious disease that comes from the burrowing screwworm larvae. And if you're somewhat fiscally minded, we're going to save the taxpayers money.

These are those technologies. But once again, to put it back in the wild, we have to have the support of the government. Our goal for our de-extinct species, our genetically modified gene drives, and even cloning of endangered species is for all of that to go into the wild, but we have to have government, Indigenous, and global support.

12. Building this company with no background in Biology

This is honestly just so crazy. It's also really cool because you come from a real tech software background. You're already very—if you've seen other labs, this probably looks most unlike any other lab you've seen.

No, I mean, it's beautiful. It's cinematic. It feels like a tech office.

There's fun stuff going on in the background of it. It is very techy for a lab, for sure.

We look at this more as a product company and a tech company than a traditional biotech company. We're not an academic lab. We're not a think tank. We're not a biotech that's going to just work on 1 solution. We have to innovate across the entire spectrum of the pipeline, and I think that you feel it here.

There's a real sense of urgency toward the mission, which I think we have to have, given some of the stats we talked about.

Yeah, so how did you construct the organization?

Having zero background in biology and biotech, I couldn't be more qualified to run this company.

But we look at it as a systems model. Extinction is a systems model. Genetic engineering, from taking a 73,000-year-old skull and going to puppies, is a systems model. Taking that kind of approach means asking the right questions and trying to fill in the right pieces.

What's great about this company, and is also hard about this company, is that there's not another one, right? There's not another de-extinction company. It's not like, "Here's your SaaS company roadmap," right?

The good news is that if we make mistakes, there aren't really other people to be judged against, because no one else had ever done it before. The bad news is that no one had ever done it before. We tried to take a very rudimentary, first-principles approach to building from the ground up. How do we build complete vertical integration into how we thought through the design of the business?

We've reorganized a couple of times internally, and I feel like we finally got the right momentum as a company. I think you're starting to see that with more and more innovations that come out of the company.

What does that composition look like? Lab research?

It's mostly scientists. We have 260-plus people, plus 17 academic partners, plus 80 folks in academic labs that we also fund, and about 95 advisers.

Oh, my God.

I know. But they're tiered. We have scientific advisers, Indigenous advisers, executive business advisers, and youth advisers, right?

Most people don't realize this. Everyone talks about our problems and how the youth are going to inherit the problems. They're also going to inherit our solutions to some of these problems. When we're solving these problems, if we're solving them in dumb ways, like I think a lot of the air-capture systems, direct-air-capture carbon systems, and a lot of other ways that we're trying to solve climate are dumb.

If we invest $1 trillion in that infrastructure globally and hand it to our kids, our kids are going to have to contend with the tech debt that comes with that. We've tried to think through how to make a solution that not only we're proud of, but that our next generation is proud of, too.

That's why having a youth advisory board is really helpful. Getting their feedback is as important as the feedback from our Indigenous board or our scientific board. So, it sounds like a lot of people, but we have different groups that manage each one of those external folks.

It also seems like you guys are really popular with kids either way.

Every decision we make, if you go to the highest level, is about trying to create value for our investors, impact for the world, and inspiration. For us—and we told our investors this from day 1—inspiration needs to be as important as value creation, and you need to be on board with that. If we do the greatest thing in the world that nobody knows about, and kids don't get excited about science, then we think we failed.

We really try to put a heavy emphasis on kids and education. I have this conversation with the scientific community a lot, including in some of the scientific journals: Kids don't read Nature, Science, and Cell, right? The ones who do—I don't know; they should work here. But the kids who read those journals are already committed to science, which would be incredible.

Most people are like, "We're competing with pop culture for the latest celebrity trend." You have to be able to communicate really hard things like CRISPR and some of these genome-engineering tools, as well as their impact and positivity in the world and what they're doing today. You have to do it in 20 seconds, and you have to do it on Instagram.

That's real, right? Because that's where people are—that's where the next generation is. That's how they communicate, right? What's our Snapchat strategy? Those are the things we think about.

13. Choosing their earliest backers

Well, we should talk about your funding history, because I can imagine that has evolved the story and the business model—the believers versus the ones that are backing up the truck now. It's probably very different.

Yeah, sure.

I can imagine that has evolved the story and the business model—the believers versus the ones that are backing up the truck now. It's probably very different.

In the early days, we were very thoughtful. We wanted long-term, technology-focused investors—people who could look at this and say, "What is the event horizon? 10 years, 20 years, 50 years out?" We were not looking for investors who were saying, "We want a fund return in 4 to 5 years in Fund X," right? Those just weren't for us.

We have some of those, but they were not our primary focus. Then we wanted a percentage of impact investors—people for whom part of their internal KPI system is tracking positive impact. We really tried to find the right balance, and I think we did a really good job.

I think most people would have said, "Oh, you should call Masa or SoftBank out of the gate," right? I think that's how most people think about a business like this. But we haven't, right? We didn't. We're big fans of what he's done, but some of those types of funds we didn't go after.

We said, "Okay, let's go to very thoughtful businesspeople. Let's go to people like Jim Breyer. Let's go to people like Thomas Tull and Mark Walter"—people who have built these legacy, large infrastructure plays and have done things in education, entertainment, science, and technology. People who were early backers in the internet and quantum, and who understand what whole new economies and systems can come from getting the entire pipeline right.

I think we were very thoughtful about that. It's funny: I think we've completely mispriced every single round of capital, because every single round of capital has been more than 2× oversubscribed. What I hear from that is, "We're cheap." We're a cheap date, and we should raise our rates on capital. Maybe we'll do that in the future.

Don't sell yourself short.

I think—yeah. But every round has been massively oversubscribed, so it makes me think that people are not just excited and see the vision and the impact, but they also think they've got a good deal.

But this is not your first rodeo. I mean, you've had a successful exit.

Yeah. I've been very fortunate to work with much smarter people than me to build a handful of businesses that have had successful, profitable exits. I do think that helps. I think that helped in the early days, right?

In the early days, our original deck was: "We have no scientists, we have no partnership with Harvard, we have no technologies, and we're a handful of software and hardware people who have no background in biology. George Church thinks he can make a woolly mammoth, and we're pretty sure that's worth something."

That was the original deck, and it was pretty bad. I'm being honest: I would've passed on it. I talked to an investor who passed in the early days, who now has a very big fund and wants to get involved, and he was like, "I just can't believe I passed on this." I was like, "I would've passed on this. In all reality, I would've passed on this."

Yeah. So, how did you guys prove them all wrong?

I think trust. I think it's easy to raise capital when you have trust, and I think trust is built by setting and managing expectations. We've done a really good job with our investor base, hopefully with the world, and also with our board, of setting and delivering on expectations.

I think we've had these surprise-and-delight moments. The dire wolves were definitely a surprise-and-delight moment. Delivering on our roadmap—we've been very consistent in our delivery, and we've been ahead. I think we've also done a really good job of exceeding expectations of what's possible.

We were told that if, in 5 years, we were doing 5 to 7 edits, we'd be great. We're now doing 100. You saw we're doing hundreds of edits. We haven't done this yet, but we're now pushing a new construct that we've designed and a new delivery mechanism that we think will allow us to do thousands of edits at once.

These are things that 3 years ago sounded impossible. A year ago, they still sounded impossible. I think we're consistently showing that. When you build that trust, I think it's very easy for people to continue to deliver or to invest.

I mean, we saw some lasers back there. Yeah, there are some lasers, right? The laser thing is pretty cool. But eventually, even that—that was in our somatic cell nuclear transfer, or cloning, lab—but that entire embryology process will eventually all be automated, right?

We've got the best embryologists doing the same thing every single day in multiple different clades of animals. In that screen that you saw, that's doing full-time screen recording.

We're looking at the position of the laser. We're looking at the position of the oocyte. We're looking at how much DNA is extracted. We had to build that entire system. I don't know if they told you that on the tour. That's all custom, so we had to build and innovate all of that hardware. In the future, that whole process will be automated with robotics.

So, do you get a report at the end of the day or at the end of the month? How do you learn and train off of that?

On that data, it's highly visual data. It's all screen capture and computer vision from an input and capture perspective. We track efficiencies and cloning rates, and we track all of that in spreadsheets.

Now, thanks to some of the next-gen applications of AI, we can do that. In the early days, things like OpenAI, Claude, and others weren't super helpful to our company, because it turns out that Opus doesn't do ancestral-state reconstruction of a genome, and it doesn't build comparative-genomics models. We had to go build all of that.

Which I think was good because we had to build out an AI team and think through some pretty hard problems. But now we're connecting existing systems. Most labs don't use things like Jira, so I think the hardest thing we've done is reprogram—not stem cells, but scientists—to work in things like Jira and Smartsheet, traditional software tools.

We're connecting those to the lab notebooks and some of our proprietary systems, all through an AI layer. The visibility that we can give our mid-level and senior management on the science teams of what's happening in the lab in near real time, through the aggregation of AI across systems, is really powerful. Now we're implementing some of these existing enterprise AI systems at scale, and it's really, really helping.

So, between that and the labs, and how everything is designed here in this secret location, how did you get—I mean, you have a very distinctive style here. How did you develop that style and the branding around it?

We wanted to make—once again, we couldn't be more underqualified—we wanted to make science cool, fun, and engaging. When we set out to do the task of getting rid of extinction, we thought it was a big problem, so we thought Colossal was a good name because it's a pretty big problem that we're trying to solve.

At the same time, we're also working with cells, which we thought was funny: We're working with the smallest things, but hopefully they're successful enough to make really big things. So we're kind of planning success, right, with the name and stuff. That's why we came up with the name.

But then we had this idea: If you're going to go back to the Bill Nye old-school models of science and excitement, where you're putting in the red food coloring and shit's exploding in the volcano, versus today, where it's only spelling bee champions and kids inventing nuclear fusion, how do you go back to the stuff I could do in the '80s and '90s?

That's old-school MTV, back before it was 16 and Pregnant, when it was TRL. How do you go back to the TRL days of MTV and mash that up with the robustness, thoughtfulness, and scientific rigor of Harvard? Harvard is boring and stuffy, so how do you take Harvard meets MTV? That was our thesis from day 1, and I think we nailed it. I think the colors and the attitude really work.

I mean, it's sick. When we walked in—

But if I said to you randomly, if you had not been here or seen anything, “Harvard meets MTV,” you'd be like, “That's just dumb.” But now that I say “Harvard meets MTV,” with everything you've seen, you're like, “That actually describes exactly what you guys have built.”

I'm very proud of that because we spend a lot of time on it. We want to evoke our brand in the messaging. We don't want to just say, “We have happy hours once a month and foosball tables.” We don't have foosball tables; they're annoying and loud. That's why you see the murals and everything in there. We want to constantly remind not just the people who come here, but our staff.

We have this unfair advantage in recruiting because you get to work on things like woolly mammoth cells and dodos versus yeast in an academic lab. But also, after you work in this lab, go try working in another lab. Go work back in academia, where you're underfunded, everything is massively politicized and massively competitive, and your labs are held up by pizza boxes. Go work in academia after you work here. You just don't see that.

I mean, we are technically—well, I can't say where we are—but there are lots of medical buildings around us.

Yeah. They don't feel like this, though.

No, I would imagine they don't. We accidentally walked into a few.

Yeah.

Because it's really hard to find.

Yeah, yeah. This is good. Great. That's the best thing I learned today.

14. Why they refuse to work on Humans

Yeah. But I'm really curious. Okay, here's a hard question.

I love hard questions.

What's on the no-go list? What can you not make? I listened to a few podcasts, and one of them was like—

Ironically, the T-shirt that I'm wearing is what we can't do. This is Gigantopithecus, which was not King Kong, but an extinct ape. It was a giant.

We will not work on anything related to humans. Our technologies can be applied to humans, and we can spin them out and license them, but we won't do the human work here. I made the joke before, but we don't want to have Colossal launch a hair solution and then people say, “Is that mammoth that people are putting on us?” We never wanted that.

There are already fringe groups of people who have some crazy conspiracy ideas about us. I don't want to encourage the idea that we're a secret government lab. I mean, the list goes on.

A government lab would be like this. Cool.

No, right. But that's part of the cover-up. We have all kinds of weird things. We actually had a very critical group from this one New York-based publication that is just weird. They like to be critical about lots of things.

They were here, and at the end of it they asked, “Do you secretly have a mammoth that you're not telling us about?” I said, “No. Why would we do that?” So there are all kinds of weird things.

We won't work on humans here because we've been asked the Neanderthal question. We won't work on nonhuman primates in vivo, either. Gigantopithecus would be amazing to see, but we're not going to do that.

You did this crazy interview with Ashley Vance. Has he come in here yet?

No, he hasn't been here yet. I've done his podcast. Weird. It's crazy that you just said this. I think I was his first podcast when he left. I think I was the first episode, or maybe the first remote.

Really?

He literally messaged me about a week ago, and we're testing—

In his studio?

It was a remote, but he literally messaged me about a week ago, and we're testing something. He's great. I didn't know him before we did his podcast, but he was awesome. We just reconnected literally in the last week.

He has crazy—I mean, he's seen some crazy stuff. You went with George Church to, you know, whatever land, and you've seen drawers with lots of stuff in them, but he went to Russia or Serbia or something. I don't know where it was. It was some cold place over there, and there was this mad scientist dude who was, I guess, a chill guy, but he had human heads in a cold locker and all this stuff. I'm like, “Ashley, you were there.”

Yeah.

What?

He's like, “Yeah, that was the craziest interview I ever did.” I'm like, “We'll work to top it next time he's here.” Or he hasn't been here, but when he comes—yeah, he's great.

He's great.

Yeah, he's great. There is definitely some weird stuff.

But synthetic biology—I don't think this is what people realize. The intersection of AI and compute, eventually quantum, and synthetic biology will transform everything. George and I have been asked this question. We were on some podcast—maybe Adam Draper's podcast—where he asked, “If you and George could do one thing, what would it be?”

We both talked about how we have this weird idea that eventually we will be able to program trees. Can you build a redwood that actually grows in the form of a house? We went down this really weird, mushroomy, hippie path, and I think it was even too weird for Adam Draper. He was like, “Okay, mammoth.”

I think that's going to be the power of synthetic biology: the idea that we can program life in whatever image we want is pretty amazing. We're advancing it, I think, further than anyone, but at the same time, we haven't even scratched the surface of what's going to be possible.

Any megalodons?

This just shows how out of the world it is. Dinosaurs are request 1. Megalodons are request 2.

Well, you have a megalodon room.

I do. Megalodon—but that's because it's—

It's really cool.

It's a really cool room, but it's a fish tank, right? It's a fishbowl, so you have to do something thematically. There is no megalodon DNA. If there was, it would be terrible to make. The ocean is scary enough, but we do get requests for megalodon quite a bit. We're not working on McDonald's.

Okay.

There's no secret U.S. Navy–Anduril mashup for megalodon.

15. Are they secretly working on Aliens?

They don't ask you to do your work on aliens?

No, no. That's another thing that we get. I've been weirdly, tangentially connected to the UAP crowd for a long time. Previously, I had a satellite company and did some imaging work for Army Space and some other things at a previous company. I'm on the UAP scientific advisory board for AARO, so I understand why people draw the conclusion.

It's not as reasonable. People think that part of one of the other conspiracies is—

Like, the advancements in genome engineering have come from us studying aliens, which is just not the case. That's just crazy talk.

I'm glad you clarified that today.

Yeah, it's crazy talk. We could spend an hour just on weird Reddit conspiracies around Colossal.

That's fun.

It's fun. We should do that. Most fun.

Okay. Well, Ben, that leaves us. We're out of time.

Thank you so much. This was so much fun. The tour was insane.

Yeah, good. I'm glad you came.

I was actually a little concerned walking from the tour into here because my mind just exploded.

Yeah, good. I love that. That's awesome.

So, thank you.

I'm glad you came. So—

Cool.