De-Extinction as a Platform Business with Colossal Biosciences
Ben Lamm is CEO and Co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, the world’s first de-extinction company. Colossal has raised more than $400 million at a valuation north of $10 billion to bring back extinct species using synthetic biology and genetic engineering. Just this year, the company unveiled the first dire wolves born in 12,000 years, created woolly mice with mammoth-like fur, and remains on track to see woolly mammoth calves by 2028.
This conversation explores Colossal’s end-to-end platform approach, from ancient DNA recovery to multiplex genome editing, and why Ben sees de-extinction not just as science fiction come true but as a venture-scale business that spins out companies, partners with governments, and raises profound ethical questions. We cover polarizing public reactions, the conservation potential of rewilding keystone species, and how synthetic biology and AI are accelerating breakthroughs once thought impossible.
Episode recorded on Aug 20, 2025 (Published on Sept 23, 2025)
In this episode, we cover:
[04:14] An overview of Colossal
[05:47] The company’s dire wolf pups debut
[10:51] Reasons behind de-extinction
[11:49] Mammoth vs. thylacine vs. dodo challenges
[18:40] How Ben co-founded a bioscience company
[20:56] George Church and Colossal’s origin story
[22:40] The “why” behind bringing back the mammoth
[27:42] Colossal’s biodiversity credit carbon model
[28:43] Trade-offs between rewilding existing species vs extinct
[31:35] Colossal’s multifaceted business model
[33:58] The company’s plastic-eating enzyme spinout
[37:57] Colossal’s unique speed of R&D
[40:38] The Colossal Foundation
[42:29] Ben’s pov on our moral obligation to transparency
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Cody Simms (00:00):
Today on Inevitable our guest is Ben Lamm, CEO and co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, the world's first de-extinction company. Colossal has raised over $400 million at north of a $10 billion valuation to bring extinct species back to life using genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Just this year, they successfully birthed the first dire wolves on earth in 12,000 years. Three pups named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi. They've also created woolly mice with mammoth-like fur and are on track to have woolly mammoth calves by 2028. I will pause to let all of that sink in before I continue.
(01:01):
We're living at a time when the science fiction we grew up with is actually happening around us. I don't need to point out the obvious Jurassic Park plot line and what Colossal is doing, but it's impossible to not do so. De-extinction, fusion breakthroughs, self-driving cars, quantum computing, cloud seeding, glacier refreezing, carbon capture, technologies that were crazy or totally theoretical ideas when I started working in tech, now are showing up all over the venture landscape.
(01:35):
Ben exemplifies this shift. He and I have known each other for over a decade back when he was building gaming and creative studios. He said five successful exits before diving into synthetic biology with zero prior biotech background. What fascinates me about this conversation is how Ben is building a venture-scale business around what could have been pure research. Colossal isn't just bringing back extinct species. They're creating a platform that spins out companies, licenses IP and works with governments on conservation projects, and it also raises bigger questions. What is the role of breakthrough technologies in solving climate and biodiversity challenges? How should we think about R&D relative to deployment of known solutions? What risks are involved in technology that has great potential and also can deeply disrupt the known order of things? Regardless of what you think of what Colossal is doing specifically, synthetic biology is clearly happening and AI and quantum computing are only going to accelerate progress in this field so I'm of the mind that we need to understand it better.
(02:46):
In this conversation. We also explore the polarizing nature of this work, the dual use implications, the ethical questions, and how you lead a company generating such intense reactions, but also what it means to be pushing the boundaries of what's scientifically possible. From MCJ, I'm Cody Simms, and this is Inevitable.
(03:09):
Climate change is inevitable. It's already here, but so are the solutions shaping our future. Join us every week to learn from experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry. Ben, welcome to the show.
Ben Lamm (03:31):
Hey, thanks for having me.
Cody Simms (03:33):
You and I have known each other for, gosh, I don't know, 12, 13 years, something like that.
Ben Lamm (03:37):
An eternity in startup world, so probably like six to 700 years in startup world.
Cody Simms (03:41):
When we met, you and I were both doing totally different things than we're each doing now. You by an order of magnitude doing something different. So we're going to get into a little bit of your entrepreneurial history and journey and all that. But I want to start with, I think just frankly drop the shock and awe on us. You guys are trying to bring back woolly mammoths. You have brought back dire wolves and you, oh, have created this new species of mouse in the process. Walk us through the big hitters. We're going to start there and go downhill from there probably on the interview.
Ben Lamm (04:14):
So Colossal is the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company, and our goal is to build out the end-to-end system so that we can help preserve existing life through things like bio vaults and others as well as open source technologies for conservation, and then also have the end-to-end system that we can bring back some life. The goal of reintroducing them back into the ecosystem and whatnot. And so now we have publicly four flagship species like the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine, the dodo, and the moa. We just recently announced that with the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre, a part of the Māori travel organization in New Zealand as well as for Peter Jackson who made The Lord of the Rings. It's not a terrible job that we're working on here.
(04:56):
And then earlier this year, it was funny, we're in South by Southwest and we launched and announced the woolly mouse where we took and edited all of the coat, the mouse equivalent of the coat color and coat texture and coat length genes from that of a woolly mammoth into that of a mouse and made the woolly mouse, which is objectively super cute. We made about 36 of them. We took two of them out of the vivarium and showed them to the world, named them Chip and Dale, which was just dumb and stupid, and they got crazy popular.
(05:26):
So I remember at South by everyone just losing their about Chip and Dale, and I was like, "Well, they're going to really lose their mind about our dire wolves." And so then fast-forward three weeks later, four weeks later, we showed the world the first dire wolves that have existed in 12,000 years, which is insane. And so-
Cody Simms (05:47):
Wait, you can't move on from that. That is fucking insane. We have a show here where we can say whatever you want. I usually try not to drop F bombs, but what the hell.
Ben Lamm (05:57):
Yeah. We showed on our mouse project that we built a computational biology core, we built a cellular engineering core, we built an ancient DNA core, built a genetic engineering core. We built a very big animal husbandry group. And so we showed that this end-to-end system for implementing edits based from our computational analysis of ancient genomes or existing genomes can work and it can work really quickly. And so the dire wolf project was only an 18-month project, so we went from a 73,000-year old skull and a 12,000-year old tooth to puppies in 18 months, which was crazy. We got literally hundreds of billions of media impressions, like 22, 25,000 ... I don't even know anymore. We stopped looking. 25,000 plus stories, which was crazy, and it was insane. I actually told our board and our investors, this is going to be 20% positive. There's going to be zero neutral and it's going to be all 80% negative. Giant Pleistocene wolf and all kinds of things. And so what was interesting is when it came out, it ended with 68% positive, which is insane. I don't feel like you can do anything in America right now and get more than 50% positive. I feel like 50% positive is the new, a hundred percent positive like the '90s. So I feel like that was pretty interesting. And then only 5% negative, and then the remaining delta was all neutral, which was crazy.
Cody Simms (07:18):
Do you consider this the world's first successful de-extinction?
Ben Lamm (07:21):
I do. This is the first time that ancient DNA ... We've mapped ancient DNA to their closest living relative in engineered those lost genes into that of a living species. And so world's first de-extinction. And well, what's crazy is even on the 5% negative, it ended up being a weird almost not religious religion, but it became this weird philosophical debate. And even in those articles, people were like, "Well, the science is amazing and it's absolutely magical what they did, but we're mad that you ... Is it a dire wolf? Is it something else?"
Cody Simms (07:56):
It reminds me of ... I was probably college age. Was it Dolly the lamb first happened where they grew a lamb out of a Petri dish or whatever.
Ben Lamm (08:04):
The cloning of Dolly was magic because if you look at what they did at Edinburgh, the cloning ... The tools that they were using were insane. It was trying to make a car with nothing but a screwdriver now. It's insane. The technical achievement of Dolly, I still think while it was a very popular story around the world, I still don't think it really got the credit it deserved on the miraculousness of that project, given the tools and technology. Now, Colossus actually invented and developed technologies around cloning using AI, robotics, computer vision and lasers. So we're like drilling holes into cells and moving things robotically. They didn't have any of that when they did Dolly. So Dolly was a true miraculous feat. So what was crazy though is we launched the dire wolves.
Cody Simms (08:50):
These are puppies. I've seen them howling, They are-
Ben Lamm (08:54):
They're not as puppies anymore, so.
Cody Simms (08:56):
Well, that's going to be my next question is where do we go here with these and why?
Ben Lamm (09:00):
I was at the preserve, I guess about three or four months ago. I haven't been up there in three or four months because I've been busy. And it was the last time that I think that I will be unattended in the preserve because. Know Romulus and Remus are two boys-
Cody Simms (09:13):
You definitely don't want the story of Colossal CEO Ben Lamm torn apart by wild dire wolves.
Ben Lamm (09:19):
Yeah.
Cody Simms (09:20):
That wouldn't be a good ending.
Ben Lamm (09:21):
I wouldn't be as happy probably. I was there and I was interfacing with Khaleesi, our girl, and she's at the time, a big Labrador, big puppy. Romulus and Remus are now ... And this is great. It's not good if you want to go pet them, but it's good for their animal welfare. They're starting to exhibit all the normal traits of wild wolves. Their head's down when they're looking at you, they're a little skittish. If you move too fast, [inaudible 00:09:46] they'll jump. And they're not just coming up to you and wanting to be petted. And I bottle-fed Romulus a baby for quite some time.
Cody Simms (09:53):
Are they technically siblings?
Ben Lamm (09:54):
Sort of. Romulus and Remus are technically siblings, but Khaleesi is not. So we say she's a sister, but she didn't come from the same ..hey all came from different litters, and Khaleesi came from a different cell line.
Cody Simms (10:07):
Do you have to keep them separated so they don't breed?
Ben Lamm (10:09):
So we did for a long time, and we just announced this in August, we just did the integration of Khaleesi in the pack. We're certified by American Humane Society. We work with 10 full-time care people just on the dire wolves in there on a 2000 acre secure ecological preserve. And so we spent through the time of socializing or with Romulus and socializing with Remus and putting them together, then separating them. We have a really great animal welfare care team that spent all of the right times and now they're fully integrated, which is pretty awesome. And we can monitor certain things like extra cycles and whatnot and prevent ... We're not letting them breed. So work containing and managing that.
Cody Simms (10:47):
Why dire wolves? Other than it's incredibly cool. Why?
Ben Lamm (10:51):
So a couple of reasons really. We have these three flagship species, mammoth, thylacine and dodo.
Cody Simms (10:56):
thylacine is the Tasmanian wolf? Tiger, excuse me.
Ben Lamm (10:59):
Yeah. Tasmanian tiger. But it is a marsupial. So they all have different challenges. And so when you're building this end-to-end system, what was great about the mammoth genome is that we've got a hundred plus genomes in different ... Very old, ranging from about 1.5 million years to about 3000 years ago. 3,500 years ago. So we have different mammoth genomes, but there's a lot of them. And the editing on the mammoth is actually not as encumbersome as that on the dodo or on the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine project, just because there's less genetic divergence between an Asian elephant and a mammoth than there is between a Fat-tailed dunnart which is the closest living relative to the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine. All these projects, we have different issues, but on the mammoth side, you've got a 22-month gestation, so literally nearly two years, and you're born with a 300 pound baby.
Cody Simms (11:49):
Hard learning cycles I guess for a startup.
Ben Lamm (11:51):
Yeah. Exactly right. But what's great about the thylacine is it's about a 13 and a half day gestation, even though it's a marsupial wolf because it ends up being started as about the size of a grain of rice as a joey, and then it grows from that as a lot of marsupials do. They grow ex utero in the pouch. So it's super cool, but there's lots of different challenges, even though the core fabric across all these species that are mammalian based are the same, and about 75% of it's the same for birds. The later stage gestation is very different in birds and in mammals, we're working on these projects, we got additional capital, people were excited, and we started looking at what species can we do? And we don't have an exact checklist. It's like you have to do X, Y and Z to meet the checklist.
(12:32):
It's like, is there a reason to do it? Is there a cultural reason? Is there an ecological reason? Is there an indigenous reason? Can the technologies in the pursuit be helpful to that of current conservation? And dire wolves checked a lot of boxes. So we went and met with a bunch of indigenous people groups and we had four or five different tribal partners for the dire wolf project specifically. And they were telling us stories on their sovereign land about the great wolf and how they think their people actually coexisted with the last of the dire wolves. And they called them the great wolves, and they talked about how they had a mane and had white fur and all this other stuff. And so it was really interesting.
(13:11):
And then there hasn't been a massive success with the red wolf recovery program. And so red wolves are the most endangered wolves in the world, and they're like the only wolf species that is endemic to just America. And there's been hybridization with coyotes and all kinds of stuff, but the program's a little stale at best. And so we said, "Well, wow, there's a sister species that we could help out by working on this. Maybe there's tools that could be helpful to the red wolf." Which we actually developed some, including a non-invasive cloning technology where we could isolate these things called endothelial progenitor cells, EPCs, and clone from them. They're not like full stem cells, but they're partially reprogrammed. So they're also great we found for biobanking. And so this has now opened up a whole new window of how conservationists can use this technology to clone mammals in the non-invasive way from an animal-
Cody Simms (14:00):
This is as you're exploring the red wolf issue?
Ben Lamm (14:02):
Or as we're working on the dire wolf.
Cody Simms (14:04):
On the dire wolf. Okay.
Ben Lamm (14:05):
So we started working with these EPCs because it's very non-invasive. You didn't have to take skin samples or biopsies or hurt the animal. So it's like just get into blood like we all do every day. So that was interesting. So we were like, "Oh, we can help red wolves with this. We can open source this cloning technology to help wolves. We can do population genetic studies around wolves." We built really cool like a pan genome for wolf populations, which is really interesting. So we did all that work and then we're like, "Okay. This makes sense." But then it's like, is it possible? And so if you go to La Brea Tar Pits you see all these dire wolves, you see thousands of skulls, but all of those due to heat and acidification in the tar don't have any viable DNA. And there's only been one sample six years before us that ever produced any viable dire wolf DNA. And they had got about .15% of the genome. Now we got about 13 fold so we got a hundred percent of the genome 13 different times, and you need to be above 10 fold.
Cody Simms (15:01):
And I heard you say, this is where you guys found a wolf skull in an archive somewhere, and were able to drill something out of a tooth.
Ben Lamm (15:07):
We re sampled that one tooth that produced only .15. We were like, "Well, we know it has some DNA so let's start there." And then we found another skull at a museum in an archive museum, and it had been found at the front of a cave, at a cave river bed section. And so we're like, "Okay. Well, it wasn't found in La Brea, and it's the only other one that we saw out there that fit where great DNA could be." And we actually worked with the museum. We actually took part of the petrous bone, which is this very dense little bone inside the inner ear, and it's a great DNA storage vessel because it doesn't change much and it's super dense, so therefore microbes and other things don't get into it so that DNA is endogenous, meaning it's from that animal most times. So we did that and then we ended up getting a great genome What most people missed when we announced this was there's 50,000 plus years of genetic divergence between our dire wolf samples. There's actually more time between that than the most recent sample and wolves today. So we got to really then zone in from an AI and computational analysis perspective, what genes really made a dire wolf, a dire wolf.
Cody Simms (16:12):
Think of 50,000 years of human evolution. That's astounding amount of time, really.
Ben Lamm (16:17):
Astounding amount of time. And so you can really understand what's fixed. Some people didn't understand this, and this is part of that 5% that wanted to just argue because they had nothing better to do. But we actually got to understand. So Colossal knows more about what makes a dire wolf than anyone else. It's like you can go look at skulls and morphology all day long, but it's like we know genetically more than anyone else because we had 500 times more data than anyone else in the world that ever had had about dire wolves.
Cody Simms (16:45):
Still am not quite following what led the dire wolf to jump to the top of the list above ... You mentioned the mammoth had this long gestation cycle, but the dodo and the thylacine maybe don't.
Ben Lamm (16:54):
The mammoth, thylacine and dodo, those were all in process. We didn't start with the dire wolf. We actually started with the mammoth, then we added the thylacine, then we added the dodo. And so none of those projects have gone slower or whatnot. These are just new resources. So when we got additional capital, because our investors were pretty happy with the progress of mammoth, thylacine and dodo, so when we got that capital, we had this big ancient DNA summit where we said, "What species should we work on?" We made a list and dire wolf on the list and it checked a lot of the boxes, but we pursued a couple of different species in parallel. And what was interesting about the dire wolves, it ended up having an indigenous component. It had a component to red wolves. There were several papers that came out about the importance of wolves for ecosystems. We ended up getting the DNA. And so that was another piece. And then we thought, well, from an education perspective and a kid's perspective, dire wolves, most people, they were mythical creatures. People thought they were Game of Thrones or one of these shows or Magic the Gathering or World of Warcraft. So when we were having this ancient DNA summit, we came back and looked at all of our findings and the dire wolf was the only one that we were looking at that checked every single box.
Cody Simms (18:08):
Or you could have said chubacabra or jackalope or something. But no, but these were actual animals that roamed the earth with humans.
Ben Lamm (18:16):
We want to stick to species from a de-extinction perspective that existed.
Cody Simms (18:20):
Maybe go back. I mentioned at the start, you and I have known each other for many years. We met when I was at Techstars running Disney's Startup Accelerator and you were building a creative studio called Creative Moon and a game studio called Team Chaos, I think. Exit both of those businesses.
Ben Lamm (18:36):
Yeah. Accenture bought Chaotic Moon and then Zynga by Team Chaos.
Cody Simms (18:40):
And you've had many other exits along the way as an entrepreneur, but it certainly didn't come from the world of biology, synthetic biology, genetics, genomics. Walk us through how in the world you started this company.
Ben Lamm (18:56):
If anyone hates the company, they should blame George Church, not me. It's his idea. I was bored and interested. So I built a handful of software companies in gaming, in consumer tech.
Cody Simms (19:09):
You and I have hung out in San Francisco at GDC before, which is again a very different world than what we're talking about here.
Ben Lamm (19:15):
I was working on AI before it was as sexy as it is today. People are like, "Why don't you just go build an AI company?" I was like, all right. And then I built a conversational intelligence platform. So we had a precursor to large language models that we also worked with Disney and others which is pretty cool. And then I built satellite and defense software. And so the consistent thread across all that was technology, software, and then also all the systems that we're doing were self-contained systems models. And so while I didn't come from biology very much like when I had to learn a lot about defense and all the nomenclatures, they speak their own language in DOD. And so learning all of that, biology is really no different.
(19:52):
So I'm one of those guys that doesn't have a lot of hobbies and so when I get interested in something, I try to look at things from a break things down and try to understand at least the elements. So I don't need to know everything about genome engineering. I don't need to know everything about all these different projects. I just need to know the core attributes so that I can ask the right questions. And I think I'm pretty good at asking good questions.
Cody Simms (20:13):
So George Church, your co-founder was like, "Hey, if I could solve one problem in the world, it would be bring back woolly mammoths."?
Ben Lamm (20:19):
I asked him that question. I was on a call with him because I was really interesting at the intersection of AI, access to compute, synthetic biology, being able to engineer life and then even eventually quantum. And so how does that matrix of things come together and what can that do for humanity? So we had this really interesting brainstorm for like 25 minutes, and then I was like, "Great." Because I was thinking about what I was going to do next. Hypergiant was growing and doing quite well, and so I was like, "What could I be interested in? I'm really interested in this idea of genetic engineering." I said, "Well, if you had one project ..." He started telling me all this interesting things his lab was doing. "If you had unlimited capital, what would you do and why?"
Cody Simms (20:56):
He's a synthetic biologist, just to make sure I understand.
Ben Lamm (20:59):
Yeah. If you don't know George, he's six foot seven. He has narcolepsy. He's a head of genetics at Harvard, and he's arguably probably one of the smartest people on the planet. A lot of the original genome reading technologies and writing technologies were all George. And so it's all George's work. He's like the father of synthetic biology. So I'd say, yeah, he is a synthetic biologist, but I think he really helped create the field. And so he told me he'd worked to bring back mammoths in other species to reintroduce them back into ecosystems.
Cody Simms (21:27):
Why?
Ben Lamm (21:27):
Well, because what's interesting is that when you remove a keystone species from these ecosystems, they start to spread. So large herbivores, keystone predators, when you remove them, that ecosystem has this ripple effect.
Cody Simms (21:41):
That's the whole red wolf problem that you were talking about, right?
Ben Lamm (21:43):
This is the reintroduction of wolves in the Yellowstone. They track how the reintroduction of wolves back in the Yellowstone has reshaped rivers because of the reintroduction of wolves. Now, the elk and all of the other large herbivores are less sedentary. There's actually healthier populations because predators feed on the young, the old and the sick. So there's less population issues in terms of sickness. They migrate so then the actual plant life along riverbanks actually grow. And then that gives you all the materials that beavers need to create dams, which creates deeper lakes, which actually created ponds, which actually creates different flows of rivers, which also brings in deeper cooler temperatures. It brings in different fish species that birds feed on. So the ripple effect of removing wolves in 1925 and reintroducing them in 1995, 70 years later is vastly insane. So there's all these rewilding things.
Cody Simms (22:34):
So why the mammoth? Of all the keystone species ... Humans have wiped out a lot of megafauna, right?
Ben Lamm (22:40):
The mammoth for a lot of reasons. I'd say one, it does capture the imagination. And so most people think of mammoths as dinosaurs, and they think they went extinct like 65 million years ago, but they didn't. They always blows people's mind when I tell them this .we as humans, were building the pyramids while mammoths were roaming the earth. That's a crazy thought when you have that duality in your brain. So one, it captures the imagination. People are excited. If you go look on every extinct list besides dinosaurs, people are like, "Oh my gosh, I love mammoths." So that's number one. Number two is elephants are under attack. There's many reasons why elephants are going extinct. And one of those is actually a vaccine that we helped develop to cure a disease called EEHV, which kills about 20% of elephants every year. It kills more than poaching, more than anything. And also human elephant conflict. Us encroaching on their land and having human elephant conflict.
(23:33):
Well, if we make mammoths and we can make a whole lineage of elephants and put them back into large areas that have low population density, you don't have that issue. You also don't have the issue of EEHV. If you cure EEHV which you have worked to do, which is pretty awesome. And our vaccine is actually being tested right now in elephants and is conferring resistance to this disease. So if Colossal does nothing else, our development of this vaccine, we'll save more elephants than all of elephant conservation in human history. And then lastly, elephants in these large herbivores are massive carbon sinks in themselves. They're also huge environmental modifiers. So they knock down trees in Africa and other parts of the world that are low carbon sequestration. They just know. They trample the dirt and they actually compact the dirt in Africa, but also they're really, really great at defecation and spreading of seed of grasslands and whatnot. So it was forecasted, and many people have been modeling that the mammoth step ecosystem, which was a very vibrant ecosystem, was a major carbon restoration.
Cody Simms (24:36):
Were mammoths, mostly natively in the Arctic region. That's what I have in my head.
Ben Lamm (24:41):
Everyone thinks ice age. So the two misconceptions about mammoths are they only lived in cold places, which is not true. There were Colombian mammoths that went down in the forest. There was a pygmy mammoth that actually lived in Greece and in Sicily. It's crazy. But there was a large distribution. And what people also don't realize is that we're in, it's called the Holocene. Before this in the Pleistocene, people think that the Pleistocene era was just the ice age, but there were these interglacial periods during that of natural global warming and natural global cooling that literally were warmer than today. And so a lot of mammoths actually traversed very large migratory patterns.
Cody Simms (25:18):
And I guess that's why they would've been in LA in the La Brea Tar Pits, right?
Ben Lamm (25:21):
Exactly right. And so there was huge disbursement from very temperate forces to even tropical forests all the way up to the negative 20, negative 30 tundras.
Yin (25:32):
Hey everyone. I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ, here to take a quick minute to tell you about the MCJ Collective Membership. Globally, startups are rewriting industries to be cleaner, more profitable and more secure. And at MCJ, we recognize that a rapidly changing business landscape requires a workforce that can adapt. MCJ Collective is a vetted member network for tech and industry leaders who are building, working for, or advising on solutions that can address the transition of energy and industry. MCJ Collective connects members with one another with MCJ's portfolio and our broader network. We do this through a powerful member hub, timely introductions, curated events, and a unique talent matchmaking system and opportunities to learn from peers and podcast guests. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. If you want to learn more, head over to mcj.vc and click the membership tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (26:33):
I came into this thinking, oh, well the permafrost is this huge carbon sink and this tipping point where if it melts, it's going to release all this methane and we're going to be in deep trouble. Is there truth to like, oh, mammoths can help with that in some way?
Ben Lamm (26:47):
There is some debate in the side because I always want to acknowledge both sides. And there's even with debate with some of our scientific advisors. What everyone generally agrees is that a ecosystem that's absent large megafauna and absent life is a degraded ecosystem. So what everyone agrees is that the reintroduction of mammoths and other cold tolerant megafauna back into the Arctic at the right density levels will help revitalize that ecosystem and that ecosystem in itself will be a better carbon sequestration.
Cody Simms (27:17):
Just to be clear, so mammoths were not wholly endemic to the Arctic regions, but there were Arctic mammoths. The ice age vision is actually accurate.
Ben Lamm (27:26):
Yes. Very much so. There are also woolly rhinos. There were woolly mammoths. There was actually this thing called the Siberian unicorn, which is a weird rhino that only has one giant horn. There's actually a very biodiverse ecosystem in that mammoth step, which we now call the tundra.
Cody Simms (27:42):
How much of the company's focus ... I know in the early days, I think I've heard you talking somewhat or maybe you and I had a conversation about there was a carbon credit climate impact portion to why the do the mammoth.
Ben Lamm (27:55):
Yeah. Absolutely. And so all the species that we look to reintroduce, there is a biodiversity credit carbon model to it from a long-term annuity perspective that actually gets insanely lucrative. But you really have to get to certain density levels and rewilding plans. So we set up these groups that include governments, indigenous people, groups, ecologists, conservationists, and even the public at large for each of our species that we're working on and have quarterly meetings because the rewilding plans in some cases will take longer than the actual genetic engineering.
Cody Simms (28:27):
Well, we haven't successfully rewilded very many active species so clearly there are challenges to rewilding.
Ben Lamm (28:34):
Conservation is massively under attack, It's massively underfunded, massively under attack. It's forecasted that we could lose up to 50% of all biodiversity in the next 25 years.
Cody Simms (28:43):
How do you think about that trade-off of the need to rewild existing life versus recreating past life? Surely you guys have had to suss this out.
Ben Lamm (28:52):
My view is it's an and not an or. And I think a lot of people ... And I understand it if you're in certain academic circles or certain conservation circles where you've always struggled to raise enough capital to make somewhat of an incremental difference.
Cody Simms (29:06):
I was reading the current conservation funding worldwide is like, I don't know, a 120-ish billion. And the gap is hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Ben Lamm (29:16):
Hundreds of billions of what you actually have to do. And so the only way you can bridge that gap is through innovation and technology. You can change all of hearts and minds of the world. Seems pretty hard to do. Or you can to change long-term consumer behavior. I think you can over generations, but we're going to lose so much in that time period. And so the way that we think about it is if we're creating biovolts and putting samples on ice, it's a lot easier to clone those than to do a complete rebuilding of an extinct species. That's a important thing. And then we have to innovate these technologies. And so my view, which is weird from a CEO of a de-extinction company or maybe the only de-extinction company, I tell people, you guys should keep doing what we're doing in conservation. 99.999% should keep doing what we're doing conservationally. Because we know conservation works, it just doesn't work at the speed of which we're eradicating species and changing the planet.
(30:04):
So what I'm saying is we are that .0001% of like we're just a safety net and our model may not work. It's very expensive to bring back species. Our hope is that in the development of this system and the refinement of the system and the open source of the technology stack of this system, more governments and more non-governmental organizations around the world can leverage these tools to make an accelerated leap into some of these new innovations that could help shorten the speed of species recovery.
Cody Simms (30:34):
With the theory of change being, if you focus on those keystone species that have been missing from these ecosystems, it should dramatically accelerate change is what I'm hearing you say.
Ben Lamm (30:43):
Exactly. And for us, it's funny, you go talk to all the top elephant conservation groups, which we work with they'll tell you nobody really cared about EEHV. Nobody really cared about saving elephants besides us. And sometimes the scientific community or the conservation community gets in and we work with many of them. They get into an echo chamber where they really care.
Cody Simms (31:01):
Us meaning them, not us meaning Colossal.
Ben Lamm (31:03):
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But that group cares, but how do you activate it in Ohio or a parent in LA or someone in Europe? And so what's been interesting about what's happened with Colossal is because the halo effect of these flagship species has gotten so much excitement around not just STEM and the technologies, but has an overlay into the conservation benefits. And so all of our partners say that their funding has gone up outside of what we've given them because we're bringing more attention to these critical issues.
Cody Simms (31:35):
Okay. So helpful context. You guys have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. I think you've said your most recent valuation was north of $10 billion. This is a venture business. What's the business model?
Ben Lamm (31:47):
So we have a couple. And so a couple of things that are interesting is our first phase of development from a business modeling perspective was not incubator you've ran incubators. So not incubators, but more of strategic problem solving that we have to have in the system, and then we can look at what are the healthcare or the industrial applications of it.
Cody Simms (32:08):
So an R&D spin out model, kind of.
Ben Lamm (32:11):
R&D spin out model. And it's very much like going the moon. Lots of stuff was developed on the path. And so if we spin out a handful of companies and those companies are all billion dollar plus opportunities, well then everyone that's an investment colossal, it's a free flyer on stuff that's not even on the balance sheet. So we spun out three companies, two of which we've announced a third, we have not. The first one is a computational biology company called Form Bio, which we're working to use AI and a bunch of tools for drug discovery as well as ... It's weird. It's like drug de-extinction. We're also taking failed drugs that have failed from different biotechs at different points of their clinical trials. We're taking them, we're putting them into our system, and then we're saying, "Oh, if you made these three little tweaks, this drug could pass clinical trials or this could pass a manufacturability hurdle." Because sometimes you have drugs that are incredible, but they cannot pass a certain hurdle in manufacturability where they are. They're not viable to be made so that the company can make money. Not our companies, but the drug companies. So we have successfully ... We're not talking about it yet. But that company, Form Bio has successfully helped several drug companies and biotech companies resuscitate or resurrect or de-extinct drugs that are pretty interesting for human healthcare.
Cody Simms (33:30):
So it's synthetic bio-native drug discovery and IP platform somewhat is what I'm hearing.
Ben Lamm (33:37):
And really trying to help identify what went wrong in their failures.
Cody Simms (33:42):
It's like a Hollywood studio that options failed scripts.
Ben Lamm (33:45):
Yeah. It's really cool. It's a cool thing. The only issue with some of those things is that they take long lead times because then you got to put the drugs in the market. They can be five plus years so you have to be thoughtful in your business modeling. But that company's doing great.
(33:58):
The second one was Breaking. It's a plastic degradation company where unlike a lot of plastic degradation companies out there, you have to separate the plastics. You have to pre-treat them. A lot of times the chemicals they're putting on them are worse than the plastics in the first place. And then a lot of them actually make microplastic. They just make smaller pieces of plastic, which is actually worse than the original plastic. We worked with the Wyss Institute and Don over there, who runs it, who's incredible. And they had discovered a microbe that created an enzyme that actually, and the reason we named the company Breaking was it actually breaks the chemical bonds of plastic. Creates carbon and creates biomass. It's really interesting for water treatment. It's really interesting for composting, it's really interesting for textiles.
Cody Simms (34:42):
How did that come out of your research at Colossal?
Ben Lamm (34:44):
They came to us. So they said, "We have this microbe. We don't really know how it works. We have this microbe, we don't know how to accelerate it. How do we take something that breaks down in 800 years, how do we have it break down in 20 months or less than two years? And then how do we eventually get it down to 22 days and how do we get to 22 hours?" We took that research, put it into our system. We built a very large AI and computational biology core here at Colossal. And so we looked at, okay, let's understand this. We're able to map it out, understand the exact genes, and understand the exact enzyme that were being made that caused this chemical reaction of breaking the carbon bonds.
Cody Simms (35:16):
How do you decide what to say yes and no to? That wouldn't necessarily feel like that's down the fairway for you.
Ben Lamm (35:23):
If it fits with our core thesis of environmental remediation, helping biodiversity, helping ecosystems those biodiversities are going to go into. That plus are there applications where our technologies could directly apply then were interested in that. So we took that technology and then we've used synthetic biology and directed evolution to accelerate its hunger for eating this plastic. So we're making the enzyme more efficient and we're making the microbe duplicate much faster.
Cody Simms (35:52):
So the doomsday scenario is it accelerates so fast that it just eats all plastic around the world.
Ben Lamm (35:58):
We put it within bioreactors, so it is contained.
Cody Simms (36:01):
Sorry. I had to go there.
Ben Lamm (36:02):
We get a lot of ... In-Q-Tel is an investor in Colossal. We get a lot of conspiracy theories.
Cody Simms (36:07):
So there's the spin out, and I'm sure it sounds like there'll be more of those underway.
Ben Lamm (36:12):
Two of our three spin outs are already valued north of a hundred million dollars and their babies in their company life cycle. And then also from a core business perspective, we're now working with governments. It's like open source. You know open source software. So it's like if you create open source, you say, any nonprofit can go use this. Any government can use this. That's great. A lot of people will take that say that's awesome. But then if they're going to go out and say, "Hey, we want to go apply this at an enterprise level with open source software," a lot of times they'll go hire the for-profit of that open source software company, go implement. Think of Red Hat or others.
Cody Simms (36:47):
Yeah. WordPress.
Ben Lamm (36:48):
All these guys. This is my software and brain working in biology. So we open source. Well, governments are now coming to us. We have three governments that we're working very closely with where they've come to us and said, "We've spent X hundreds of millions of dollars to save these species. There's applications culturally for us, there's applications to ecotourism. There's all these applications to us and we're not making a lot of progress. And you guys can come in and do engineer and genetic diversity. You guys can help us produce more of these specific species." And with the fees they pay us, which are large, they still end up saving hundreds of millions of dollars. But more importantly, they save decades and they get better products, meaning that the animals are better products, they have more engineered in genetic diversity, there are healthier lines of things.
Cody Simms (37:31):
And this is for both de-extinction projects and for existing conservation projects?
Ben Lamm (37:35):
[inaudible 00:37:35] species. They're not extinct species, existing species. So we're not working on any de-extinction projects for governments at this time.
Cody Simms (37:43):
The de extinction, it seems like has created incredible brand awareness for you as a very young company. High amounts of media impressions and awareness that I assume drives this pipeline of R&D even for the existing species.
Ben Lamm (37:57):
So not to jump back to the R&D side, but we are delivering 95 plus edits at a time in multiplex editing. No one else on the planet is doing that. When I say these are nonlinear repeats, other people are doing the same thing over and over again, but we're doing 95 different changes on the genome at the exact same time. To our knowledge, we've synthesized some of the biggest pieces of DNA and inserted it three X more than anything that's ever been published. We have an artificial womb team, so even the precursors to our artificial womb, we're developing tools and technologies that could have massive applications to human healthcare.
(38:30):
So we actually have a media that we've patented that allows as well as a hydrogel and microfluidics device and a camera system that actually gets embryos to develop further healthier. And so if you go to an IVF clinic they look at ... Most people that aren't doing like the PGT level of testing. They're looking at the morphological or physical attributes of those embryos at a couple of days of development. But if you can grow them out two weeks, you actually learn a lot more and if that morphological grade is better, well, we have a media that makes that better and makes for healthier embryos. The embryo doesn't fix a genetic anomaly or an aneuploid cell or anything like that, but for a healthy embryo makes them grow better and faster and farther along. So that's actually great from a morphological perspective, a hatching perspective for IVF. So we think that that subset of our larger artificial wound technology can be transformative for human healthcare.
Cody Simms (39:23):
Do you draw a line there as a company in terms of working on human health?
Ben Lamm (39:27):
We don't do anything with humans at Colossal. If there's all the technologies that have application to humans, we'll license or spend those out.
Cody Simms (39:36):
So it sounds like the IP licensing, whether it's open source or a licensed model, is also a big part of the business model.
Ben Lamm (39:43):
Huge part of the business model. And then long-term now working with governments around-
Cody Simms (39:48):
Which by the way, that's a classic biotech business model. That's how biotech companies work.
Ben Lamm (39:52):
This is a very normal business model. But then there's two other things that are pretty interesting. Based on the amount of views that we get and the amount of excitement that we get there's educational opportunities for kids and curriculum with countries. We're working with a country right now on building curriculum that'll go into schools. There's a fee on that and whatnot. We're also working with-
Cody Simms (40:09):
So you have a media business or a media/education business I guess?
Ben Lamm (40:13):
It's not like Mr. Beast level, but I think it could be. I think that it will always be dwarfed by the technology business, but there will be that layer to it that's interesting.
Cody Simms (40:23):
I imagine there will be a nonprofit ecosystem that should crop up around the things you build. For example, when the mammoths are ready to be reintroduced, it would seem there should be a nonprofit effort to help oversee the rollout and management of that.
Ben Lamm (40:38):
In addition to Colossal, we launched the Colossal Foundation, which we raised $50 million for. And so we're basically seeding universities. Works to about 17 different universities and about 60 different conservation partners where we're funding the application of our technologies into their specific nuanced species sets they're working on as well as rewilding plans.
Cody Simms (40:59):
Let me take the other side of the question here, which is like everything you just described, you're describing it as positive for animal health, positive for human health. There's also a potentially clear dual use problem here where it could also be used to develop bio weapons or things like that. You mentioned the CIA is an investor in your business. How do you navigate that side of things?
Ben Lamm (41:19):
We keep the intelligence community and others in the government very updated with our progress. Look, the reality with competition biology, AI and synthetic biology, being able to engineer life is, there's a lot of bad stuff that can come from that. I think we're doing things right. We'll probably make a lot of mistakes and fuck up. We learn every day and we try to do better. But the reality is that I believe that synthetic biology powered by AI and quantum is significantly more powerful than nuclear weapons or anything else that we could ever think of. So I think that the US has to lead in that in the world. We also can't put the genie back in the bottle. We can't just go put the genie back in the bottle and say, "Oh, synthetic biology doesn't exist."
Cody Simms (41:59):
It's the AI debate. It's like it consumes all this energy, and so could it be bad? And it's like, it's happening. It's going to happen. What are we going to do about it?
Ben Lamm (42:08):
It has to occur. I'm an eternal optimist. For a long time I'm always like, "Yeah, everything's possible. It's amazing. We should just go do it and we should all work together and it should be a utopia." I'm pretty optimistic about stuff.
Cody Simms (42:19):
That is the criticism here. It's like, "Oh, these are just some Silicon Valley tech bros doing stuff because they can, but should they?" But it's going to happen anyway so how do you do it the right way?
Ben Lamm (42:29):
I think that we have a moral obligation to innovate and build technologies and to create as a species. And I think this is just another canvas to paint within. And I do think that the applications to painting of this canvas will create opportunities for debate and regulation and all these things around humans and weapons and other things. But I also think it'll have a halo effect of inspiring the next generation. A little kid goes and sees a mammoth back in the Arctic or even sees a video of a real ... That's not AI generated of a mammoth, they're going to be blown away. And I think that's really awesome. They may want to say, "Oh, I want to go be a geneticist because of that." There's a lot of people that work at Colossal, but also are in the field of genetics that are household names in the scientific community that became geneticists because of Jurassic Park.
Cody Simms (43:15):
Oh, amazing.
Ben Lamm (43:15):
That's just a fact. And so that doesn't mean that they wanted to make a dinosaur, but it inspired them at the right age. And so that's something that we care a lot about. And then if you could do something that also has a halo effect to conservation, I think the impact in creating value and also inspiring the next generation, that is a pretty interesting Venn diagram.
Cody Simms (43:35):
It feels like you're building a company that maybe among the most polarizing companies I've seen in a long time, where the reaction is either that's fucking cool or that's fucking terrifying. Pardon my language. I guess you mentioned the dire wolf reaction was largely positive, but how do you navigate that as a CEO?
Ben Lamm (43:52):
I think anytime you're doing something big and bold, you should be transparent and try to educate. So we spend a lot of time on this. We could just all be in the lab keeping our mouse. We have plenty of funding. We don't need to have these conversations. But we try to put it out there and answer the questions and try to be as transparent as possible. It doesn't mean everyone's going to like everything we're doing. It doesn't mean everything's going to like everything we say. But at the same time, I still think that we try to have this attitude where we have the conversation. There's certain media outlets, for example, that absolutely hate us, that have done hit pieces on us, done weird hit pieces on me, and I'm like, "I'm not even from your field. I don't know why you hate me so much." And where we've gotten emails on the same day from two journalists at two competing publications that have the same questions on the same day that our competitors. It's like CNN and Fox News on the same day. It wasn't them, but it's like them sending you the same thing on the same day. This feels a little contrived, guys. If you could have spaced it out a couple of hours, it would've been less ...
(44:47):
But even with that, we still talk to them and we still respond to them. We've had people like new scientists that have misquoted our chief science officer and said things that she didn't say, and we know that because we have the recording of the call. But even with that, we still talk to them because we feel like there's an obligation to answer questions because we don't want people to be fearful. And I think that through transparency and through education, people will not be fearful of these technologies. They'll understand it more. And what we found is our job is to really educate. It's not to persuade.
Cody Simms (45:19):
Well, Ben, we could keep going for another two hours, I'm sure. I know you got to jump. I really appreciate you making the time. Fascinating to learn what you're doing. Great to catch up with you and looking forward to following the journey along.
Ben Lamm (45:29):
Great. Thanks so much, man.
Cody Simms (45:31):
Thanks, Ben. Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. At MCJ, we back founders driving the transition of energy and industry and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about MCJ, visit us at mcj.vc and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at newsletter.mcj.vc. Thanks and see you next episode.
