Colossal raises $200M to bring back the woolly mammoth

Bringing back extinct animals sounds straight out of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. In the novel, scientists extracted dinosaur DNA from amber-trapped mosquitoes; in reality, a biotech startup is raising serious cash to pull off a modern version of the stunt.

Colossal Biosciences, based in Dallas and Boston, just closed a $200 million funding round. The fresh capital is earmarked to accelerate its work in "de-extinction," focusing on bringing back the woolly mammoth, thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), and the dodo.

A massive valuation for ancient DNA

The round was jointly led by TWG Global, an investment firm steered by Mark Walter and Thomas Tull with footprints across tech, AI, finance, and sports. Notable backers also include video game pioneer Richard Garriott.

Since launching in September 2021, Colossal has stacked up $435 million in total capital. This latest $200 million injection vaults the startup’s valuation to a staggering $10.2 billion.

That is an eye-popping figure for a company tackling speculative biology. But Colossal insists the mission reaches far beyond creating ice age safari parks.

Beyond ancient giants

Colossal plans to direct the funding toward its core genetic engineering pipeline while pioneering new software, wetware, and specialized hardware.

These tools have utility well outside of de-extinction. The company says the exact same underlying technologies will be leveraged for modern biodiversity preservation and broader human healthcare applications.

Basically, engineering a woolly mammoth is the extreme test case. If you can master genome reconstruction and artificial gestation at that scale, tackling rare genetic diseases in humans or saving dying species becomes a far more manageable problem.

Why it matters

We think Colossal’s branding playbook is pure genius, but not without substantial risks.

Pitching a standard synthetic biology platform rarely commands a $10.2 billion price tag. By anchoring its mission to mammoth revivals, Colossal turned a deep-tech moonshot into mainstream culture, attracting mainstream capital like media moguls and game designers.

For the wider industry, Colossal’s heavy investment in software and wetware infrastructure could yield valuable spinouts for computational biology and gene therapy. If their toolchain delivers, synthetic biology across the board gets faster and cheaper.

That said, high valuations bring heavy scrutiny. It looks like the company has set a massive bar for itself, and reviving extinct beasts faces intense ecological, ethical, and biological hurdles. Everyday users cannot touch this tech today, and whether Colossal can actually deliver a living mammoth remains science’s biggest waiting game.