In 2021, North Texas entrepreneur Ben Lamm and renowned geneticist George Church launched the de-extinction company Colossal. To date, the company has raised $235 million to bring back the Woolly Mammoth, Dodo Bird, and Thylacine Tiger—and scaled to 155 full-time employees. Now, having raised an additional $50 million in funding, the corporation—now valued at north of $1 billion—is launching the Colossal Foundation to aid in the conservation effort of three critically at-risk animals and create the largest distributed biobanking initiative in the world.
The foundation will be led by Colossal’s Chief Animal Officer Matt James, who, before joining Colossal in 2022, has spent his entire career in animal science at an aquarium or zoo, including the Dallas Zoo. “I love nonprofit work because of the amazing mission-oriented nature of the business,” said James, the foundation’s executive director. “But there’s not another organization more mission-oriented [in this space] than Colossal.
“This is an amazing opportunity to marry capital with amazing technology that has never been done before. Resource limitations are what has been holding conservation back for years—and that’s not the fault of anybody working in conservation. It’s the broken economics of conservation.”
Colossal Foundation plans to raise more funds, but executives are currently focused on deploying its initial capital. “We got so much support just from pitching our core investors that we were ready to launch this thing,” Lamm said. “Our next move is to open this up to all our investors and the rest of the world. Raising capital is never easy, but with our success metrics in such a short period, investors have been very supportive.”
The nonprofit will be a lean operation. In all, it will employ about four or five full-time employees—with several corporate employees donating their talents to aid in financial services, accounting, or other needs. “The fewer people we have to pay, the more capital goes to conservation efforts,” Lamm said. “Ninety-nine percent of the capital we raise, we want to go directly into the hands of the men and women on the ground in these areas to fuel conservation. There’s just not enough money going into conservation. It’s quite crazy how much capital other conservation nonprofits raise that never make it into the field to help animals. The Colossal Foundation will not be having $10,000 black tie dinners; we’re really focused on making a difference.”
Colossal plans to subsidize the use of its genetic rescue technologies that it is using in its de-extinction efforts into the hands of the on-ground workers in the regions of three critically endangered species. With the use of A.I., machine learning, and computational biology, these animals will benefit from genetic rescue, biobanking, and the creation and use of reference genomes. Colossal will also accelerate species adaptation and create genetic resilience through biotechnology.
- Vaquita: A porpoise that looks like a dolphin, it only has a population of 10 to 13 in the Sea of Cortez in Baja California, Mexico. It is the most endangered cetacean in the world. Colossal will partner with the Vaquita Monitoring Group in support of the Mexican government’s La Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas on conservation efforts.
- Sumatran Rhino: With fewer than 80 left in existence, this rhino species, the smallest in size of all rhinos, lives in fragmented populations throughout the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo. Colossal will partner with Bogor Agricultural University in support of the Indonesian government on this project.
- Ivory-Billed Woodpecker: Having previously been declared extinct, an ivory-billed woodpecker was rediscovered in Arkansas in 2004. The species has not been seen since. Colossal will utilize its Avian Genomics Group alongside private philanthropists to lead efforts for the bird’s rediscovery.
The nonprofit is not Colossal’s first foray into conservation. The company is deploying its technology free of cost to area partners to save orphaned baby elephants in Botswana. Colossal is also developing an mRNA vaccine for a virus that kills 20 percent of elephants annually and is the exclusive genetic rescue partner for the northern white rhino. “We don’t want capital to be the limiting factor in innovation for biodiversity loss,” Lamm said. “We also want to fund men and women developing technologies. An acoustical bouy system is being developed in the Sea of Cortez for the vaquita, we are supporting that effort.”
As for the biobanking initiative, Colossal Foundation will partner with Re:wild, Leonardo DiCaprio’s conservation organization, to execute genomic sequencing, build population genomics maps, and establish cell lines. “We want researchers out in the field to be able to leverage our resources on a daily basis,” Lamm said.
On the corporate side for Colossal, the company is on schedule in its efforts to bring back the Woolly Mammoth. The Thylacine Tiger project is “crushing it, and ahead of schedule,” Lamm said, and the Dodo Bird project is tracking toward developing “primordial germ cells by the end of the year, or early Q1.”
It is all progress that is being recorded for a docuseries about Colossal. “We have cameras following us everywhere we go,” Lamm said, “but it’s important to document this for science and transparency’s sake.”
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