Colossal Biosciences Could Hit a 30 Billion Dollar Valuation, and De-extinction Is Driving It

Colossal Biosciences, the company trying to bring back the woolly mammoth, the thylacine, and the dodo, is reportedly in talks to raise new capital at a valuation of between 20 billion and 30 billion dollars. If that number lands at the top end, Colossal would be one of the most valuable biotech startups in the world, sitting alongside companies working on cancer treatments, gene therapies, and pandemic preparedness. All of which raises a genuinely interesting question: what has changed to make a de-extinction company worth that much?

From Science Project to Serious Biotech

Colossal was founded in 2021 by entrepreneur Ben Lamm and geneticist George Church of Harvard University. It raised 75 million dollars in its first round and has continued growing quickly, hitting a 10.2 billion dollar valuation by early 2024. The jump to a potential 20 to 30 billion dollar range represents the kind of valuation acceleration that tends to happen when a company shifts from being an interesting research project to something that looks like a real platform business.

The key shift is that Colossal has been quietly building a toolkit of genetic technologies that have applications well beyond making mammoths. The company has developed advances in ancient DNA sequencing, CRISPR editing at scale, and stem cell biology that are useful for conservation, human medicine, and industrial biotechnology. The mammoth is the headline, but the underlying technology stack is the product.

The Mammoth Is the Marketing, the Genome Tools Are the Business

This is the part that tends to get lost in the coverage. When Colossal announced it had created woolly mammoth-like cells and made progress on cold-adapted elephant traits, those were genuine scientific milestones. But they were also brilliant marketing for a company building serious genomic infrastructure.

The Colossal approach involves editing the Asian elephant genome to introduce traits from the woolly mammoth, things like cold tolerance, fat distribution, and coat characteristics. Doing that at scale requires developing tools for editing large animal genomes with a precision and reliability that previously did not exist. Those tools have value independent of whether a mammoth ever walks the Siberian steppe.

Similarly, the company's work on the thylacine involves reconstructing the genome of an extinct species from fragmentary museum samples, which requires advances in ancient DNA recovery and computational genome assembly. Those techniques have obvious applications in forensics, conservation genetics, and potentially personalised medicine.

Why Now, and Why This Valuation?

A few factors are likely converging. The broader biotech market has been recovering from a rough 2022 and 2023. AI-driven drug discovery and genomics companies have attracted enormous investor interest, and Colossal sits at the intersection of genomics and computation in a way that makes it legible to investors who might otherwise struggle with pure biotech.

There is also a cultural moment at play. The idea of de-extinction has gone from science fiction to something that feels imminent. Colossal has been careful to frame its work as ecological restoration, the idea that bringing back keystone species like the mammoth could help restore grassland ecosystems and potentially support carbon sequestration in the Arctic. Whether or not that framing holds up to scrutiny, it gives the company a climate tech story alongside its biotech story.

The Risks Are Real

A 30 billion dollar valuation for a company that has not yet produced a living mammoth, thylacine, or dodo is an act of faith in future potential, not present revenue. The timelines for de-extinction remain genuinely uncertain. Even if all the science works, the regulatory, ecological, and ethical questions around releasing a de-extinct species into the wild are enormous and unresolved.

Colossal's real near-term revenue likely comes from licensing its genomic tools and from partnerships with pharmaceutical and agricultural biotech companies. That is a legitimate business, but it is a different story than the one the headlines tell. Investors at this valuation need to believe both stories simultaneously, and that is a significant ask.