Colossal spinout Astromech raises $20M at $3.8B valuation
What's the deal? Astromech, an AI startup spun out of Ben Lamm's Colossal Biosciences, raised $20 million at a $3.8 billion valuation, the company said in August 2026. The round was led by Bob NelsenDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, with Peak 6Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, NeoGenesis CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Builders VCDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and CA InvestmentsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → participating.
The raise brings Astromech's total funding to $60 million and nearly doubles the valuation it reached in March.
What's the endgame? Founded by Ben LammDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and George ChurchDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Astromech is building AI models to forecast biology. It aims to predict where biological systems are heading and where they may be vulnerable, with uses spanning conservation, disease prevention, drug resistance, and food supply threats.
The company will use the funding to expand its research team, add training data from new species, and scale how it trains its models.
Why now? Astromech says it is in deep research and development, with an operational platform and research pipelines already running. Its technology is built on genomic data developed at Colossal.
Its first demonstration targets the genetic sources of longevity. The company is applying its model to evolutionary outliers — cancer-resistant Asian elephants, bowhead whales that live over two centuries, and Brandt's bats that survive more than 40 years despite weighing a few grams.
What they said: "Biology runs the world and historically, we have only reacted to it," LammDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → said in a release. "Astromech is building the AI system predicting how living systems will change and where they are most likely to break."
ChurchDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Harvard University genetics professor, said most variations that matter for complex traits "are regulatory rather than coding," making the reconstruction of ancestral regulatory states crucial to explaining traits like longevity.
The signal: Colossal, best known for its de-extinction work on woolly mammoths, is now producing startups as well as species. Astromech's fast valuation jump shows continued investor appetite for AI applied to biology, even for ventures still in the research phase.
Read more: The Dallas Morning News · Dallas Business Journal
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
