Colossal Biosciences, the world’s first company dedicated to bringing back animals from extinction, has secured $200 million in series C funding. The latest investment announced Wednesday doubles the tech company’s total funding to $435 million since its 2021 launch, boosting the company’s valuation to $10.2 billion.
Colossal has made headlines in the past for its plans to bring back the woolly mammoth, the thylacine — commonly referred as the Tasmanian tiger — and the dodo bird. The Texas-based company, with a team of 170 scientists and labs in Boston, Dallas, and Melbourne, uses advanced gene-editing technology to try to produce organisms genetically close to long-lost species. The company also helps fund animal preservation projects. Its efforts have led to notable advancements in science and technology.
The company announced last year that its scientists had assembled the most complete Tasmanian tiger genome to date from a century-old pickled head. Colossal scientists were also the first to generate elephant induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs) — cells that could potentially be developed into any tissue in the body — in a lab.
“Preservation and de-extinction aren’t cheap, right?” Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm told Quartz. “You’ve got to have the best staff. You got have the best academic partners. You have to have the best labs. It really does require you to have a lot of the best — on top of the latest and greatest technology. And so being able to nearly double all the capital that has been raised today and accelerate efforts is really great. It’s truly game changing for us.”
The new financing comes from TWG Global, a holding company with investments spanning technology and AI, financial services, and private lending, as well as sports and media.
“Colossal is the leading company working at the intersection of AI, computational biology and genetic engineering for both de-extinction and species preservation,” TWG Global CEO Mark Walter said in a statement. “Colossal has assembled a world-class team that has already driven, in a short period of time, significant technology innovations and impact in advancing conservation, which is a core value of TWG Global. We are thrilled to support Colossal as it accelerates and scales its mission to combat the animal extinction crisis.”
Lamm said the new financing will help fund even more breakthroughs and potentially expand the team’s species de-extinction list.
“A big goal would be, maybe in 2026, to birth the first animal — obviously not a mammoth, thylacine, or dodo — but some type of small mammal through external means,” Lamm said about the company’s ambitions in the coming years. “That’d be amazing.”