Noah's Ark 2.0: Ben Lamm on Building Colossal's De-Extinction Machine

Key points

Key takeaways from The Upstarts Podcast interview with Colossal Biosciences founder and CEO Ben Lamm (October 2026):

The mammoth as North Star. Co-founded with Harvard geneticist George Church in 2021, Colossal picked the woolly mammoth as its guiding mission: species de-extinction is a moonshot, but the tools built to get there — gene editing, cloning and artificial wombs — are what Lamm believes make the company valuable.

It's not Jurassic Park. Lamm insists Colossal will never bring back dinosaurs; the de-extinction targets are species with living relatives, starting with the dire wolf, dodo, Tasmanian tiger and woolly mammoth — and the firm reads whole genomes rather than splicing, studying 104 mammoth genomes to guide its edits.

Proof over promises. The science is working: Colossal has cloned at least three dire wolves, kept in a secret location, and created woolly mice; one early investor warned the mission would 'completely ruin' Lamm's career, and he spent $1 million of personal cash to keep the company alive through early doubts.

The valuation story. Colossal has reportedly held talks to raise new capital at a valuation north of $23 billion, up from around $10 billion in early 2025 — Lamm calls the business 'the most undervalued company on the planet', citing the breadth of its biotech tooling and conservation work.

Conservation as the counterweight. Alongside de-extinction, the company runs current-day conservation programmes, including work with elephants, and is spinning out government contracts and commercial products — a portfolio Lamm frames as Noah's Ark 2.0.

Building biology like software. Lamm contrasts biology with software: biology moves on biological time, iteration is expensive and failure is physical, so Colossal plans for decade-long horizons rather than startup sprints — though he concedes the mammoth deadline is slipping as teams work on artificial wombs.

Success means every species. Lamm says he will not consider anything short of reviving every targeted species a success; missing a single one would mean failure, and he credits an unusual early investor base — kids brought in around 30% of Colossal's investors — with keeping that ambition alive.

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