Colossal Biosciences raises $200M at $10.2B valuation to bring back woolly mammoths

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), include 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.

Colossal plans to spin off three businesses over the next two years, one of which will be for its artificial womb technology, which could have applications in fertility treatment.

The company has already spun out two businesses: One of these, Breaking, helps break down plastics and last year raised $10.5 million in seed funding, while the other is Form Bio, a computational biology platform, which secured $30 million in funding.

Government collaborations are another potential source of revenue. While Colossal offers its conservation technology to governments at no cost, Lamm said some countries are asking Colossal for help with preserving endangered species. Some governments are also exploring de-extinction projects for animals that hold cultural and, in some instances, spiritual value for their people.

If Colossal successfully resurrects and reintroduces any of the species into their respective ecosystems, the company anticipates generating revenue through the sale of biodiversity credits, a market-based mechanism similar to carbon credits.

Lamm said all three of its revenue streams – the tech, government collaboration, and biodiversity credits —could bring in billions of dollars in annual recurring revenue, and they show the “short-term, the mid-term, the long-term economic” potential of the company.