A biotech startup promising to resurrect woolly mammoths would have become the first “reverse extinction unicorn” with a valuation that would exceed $1 billion before recovering a single lost species. colossal biosciencesBased in Dallas, it took public a new round of investment that helped finance its effort to bring back perhaps the most famous extinct animal of all: the dodo.
Reintroducing mammoths to Alaska or dodos to Mauritius sounds unrealistic, even silly, and has drawn skepticism from paleogenetists and other experts who fear the effects of extinction are unpredictable. However, Colossal has continued to attract support from investors, including celebrities, and on Tuesday announced another $150 million in financing to bring the total to $225 million from 2021. A person familiar with the company said that with the latest round, the company would be valued at about US$1.5 billion.
For some investors, a living dodo is less important than the scientific advances made through efforts to bring species back from extinction. “On the road to bringing back a species, we’re going to learn things that we can’t learn in a hands-on lab,” he said. Thomas Tull, a tech investor who produced the movie Jurassic World and made money investing in scrubs. company figs. His US Innovative Technology fund led the latest round. “When you’re doing big things like this, who knows what you’re going to discover along the way.”
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The cash influx comes as the financial world has taken a new interest in the biodiversity crisis. The United Nations conference on biodiversity in December 2022 drew representatives from Wall Street, and global banks are dabbling in “debt-for-nature” swaps that would protect vulnerable ecosystems in exchange for rolling over sovereign debt in developing countries. Colossal is positioning itself as a solution to the damage done to the natural world, and co-founder Ben Lamm says we have an opportunity to reverse the human-caused loss of biodiversity.
How it would be profitable for investors to restore species that have long since ceased to exist is an open question. Colossal has already spun off a software company that has raised another $30 million, and Colossal investors have received the capital of the new company. The company suggests that other promising areas for future spinoffs could include gene editing and artificial wombs.
Company workers regularly mention the space race when discussing the company’s prospects as an example of a seemingly impossible goal that was not only achieved over time, but also ended collateral inventions that we still use today. “The good thing about these extinct species is that they are systems problems,” Lamm said in an interview. Solving a systems problem requires innovation in multiple areas and therefore creates breakthroughs that can lead to more side effects. “It’s like the moon landing. That was a system problem.”
Lamm, who co-founded Colossal with Harvard University geneticist George Church, also believes that Colossal’s goal gives it a competitive advantage in recruiting staff who would rather investigate vanished beasts than less exotic projects. “You can work on yeast or you can work on bringing back an extinct species,” he said.
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The dodo is the third extinct animal on Colossal’s to-do list. In March, the startup said it would bring back the woolly mammoth, and in August added a promise to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, which was declared extinct in the 1930s. The company says it’s on its way to producing offspring. of mammoth by 2028.
The constant stream of announcements has captivated a list of celebrity investors, including Paris Hilton and motivational speaker Tony Robbins, who nonetheless lent an aura of scientific seriousness to the project. But Colossal has also recruited less famous investors with considerable pedigree, though it’s unclear how involved they are. “Strategically, it’s less about the mammoths and more about the ability” to engineer animals and plants, the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel said in a blog post in September when he invested in Colossal. .
“They are solving complex problems and we are pleased with the progress so far,” said Jim Breyer, an early Facebook backer investing in Colossal through his firm Breyer Capital. “In the long term, there will be significant revenue opportunities around sustainability, conservation and the restoration of nature.”
Tom Chi of At One Ventures, a founding member of Google X, Alphabet Inc.’s innovation lab, is the only independent member of Colossal’s three-member board of directors. He has made ambitious investments in other tough ventures like Helios Labs, which seeks to extract metals and oxygen from the surface of the Moon and Mars.
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Chi dismisses the focus on Hollywood investors. “Are they messing with the way we do science? No,” she said in an interview. In fact, Chi said, the science behind Colossal was so difficult that many of his backers didn’t fully understand it. “It would probably take eight hours to explain it to a celebrity.”
Traditional investors remain skeptical of the field. “I think the extinction angle could be promising for scientific discovery, but probably very difficult for the company in terms of market, cost and speed to scale,” said Helen Liang, managing partner at Founders X Ventures. “The bigger question is what business values could be unlocked and the capital cost justification for doing so.”
The dodo was a flightless bird, twice the size of a turkey, and lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles (885 kilometers) east of Madagascar. The last known one was killed in the late 1600s, after people arrived on the island and hunted the bird for food, took over its habitat, and introduced pigs and monkeys that ate its eggs.
Just getting a dodo sample was a daunting task for Colossal.
Beth Shapiro, the company’s paleogenetics manager and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has sought to extract genetic material from the dead bird for most of her career. She has scraped the insides of dodo skulls and sweated on sugar plantations in Mauritius. She finally got lucky with a well-preserved specimen in a Danish museum, and Colossal now says she has the only high-quality, complete sequence of dodo DNA.
Resurrecting the bird would only be the beginning. Shapiro would caution that any dodo released into the wild would need to be protected from the predators that exterminated them centuries ago. The small islands off the coast of Mauritius, where giant tortoises have also been reintroduced, might be a good place. “Once we have functional dodos,” he said, “we’ll have to create a habitat that can support them.”
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