Colossal hasn’t revived a single extinct species, yet Colossal is reportedly in talks at a $20 billion to $30 billion valuation.
Colossal Biosciences hasn’t brought back a single extinct animal.
And yet the company is reportedly in talks to raise fresh capital at a valuation of $20 billion to $30 billion, according to Axios.
Axios’s own reporting names two: Breaking, which works on plastic degradation, and Form Bio, a computational biology software company.
Venture money has never been priced purely on what a market looks like today, and a $20 billion to $30 billion valuation implicitly assumes both of these become real.
Colossal hasn’t revived a single extinct species, yet Colossal is reportedly in talks at a $20 billion to $30 billion valuation.
That would be up to triple the $10.2 billion it was worth in January 2025.
Its platform, spinouts, and speculative backing look like the real reason investors are interested.
Colossal Biosciences hasn’t brought back a single extinct animal. Not the woolly mammoth, not the dodo, not the Tasmanian tiger. And yet the company is reportedly in talks to raise fresh capital at a valuation of $20 billion to $30 billion, according to Axios.
If the round lands at the top of that range, it would nearly triple the $10.2 billion valuation it carried when Tech Funding News covered its $200 million Series C in January 2025, roughly sixteen months ago.
So the real question isn’t whether Colossal can pull off de-extinction. It’s what, exactly, investors think they’re buying at that price.
Beyond the mammoth
Colossal was co-founded in 2021 by entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church, among several other co-founders. Lamm has launched multiple technology companies before this one, while Church supplies the underlying scientific credibility in genomics and synthetic biology.
De-extinction is the headline, but it isn’t really the product. Colossal’s actual toolkit, gene editing, reproductive technology, computational biology, and AI-driven genomics, has uses that reach well past bringing back lost species.
Its chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, put it plainly when TFN covered the company’s Series C: “The unique challenges of avian reproduction require bespoke approaches to genetic engineering, for example, and our dodo team has had impressive success translating tools developed for chickens to tools that have even greater success in pigeons.”
Colossal has also started generating revenue and expanding its government ties. In February 2026, the United Arab Emirates put $60 million into the company as part of a partnership to build a global “BioVault” for endangered-species genetic material, according to USA Today. That deal alone pushed the company’s total capital raised to $615 million, on top of the U.S. government relationships it has separately built around conservation technology.
A platform creating new companies
The clearest case for Colossal’s valuation is what it has spun out rather than what it has revived.
Reports on the new funding talks differ slightly on the count: TechCrunch counts three spinouts, adding Astromech, an AI-driven predictive-biology company valued at $2 billion in March, to the list. Axios’s own reporting names two: Breaking, which works on plastic degradation, and Form Bio, a computational biology software company.
Either way, Colossal is turning its own intellectual property into separate, fundable businesses, which is a different, and arguably more durable, kind of platform than a single de-extinction approach.
Eyeing markets that don’t yet exist
Some of what investors are pricing in doesn’t exist as a market at all. Lamm has told reporters that he expects the company to have a working artificial womb for mammals within a year, with potential uses in human fertility treatment.
Colossal has also floated biodiversity credits as a future revenue stream, a market-based mechanism modelled on carbon credits, where restoring ecosystems could eventually carry its own economic value.
Neither of those is close to mature. Venture money has never been priced purely on what a market looks like today, and a $20 billion to $30 billion valuation implicitly assumes both of these become real.
The investment thesis, without the mammoth
Strip away the marketing, and Colossal looks less like a single-species science project and more like a synthetic biology platform with several commercial paths running at once: intellectual property, gene-editing tools, AI-driven biology, government and sovereign-wealth partnerships, and a track record of spinning out new companies from its own research.
The woolly mammoth is still the most recognisable part of the pitch. But if the reported $20 billion to $30 billion round closes, it will say less about whether Colossal can resurrect a species and more about how much investors are willing to pay for the platform built while trying.
What isn’t yet public is where that money would go, as Colossal hasn’t disclosed how a new round would be allocated across scaling its core science, funding new spinouts, or further acquisitions like its 2025 purchase of ViaGen Pets and Equine. Until the round closes, the size of the number is the story, but the allocation of it is not.
