The founder of Colossal Biosciences, Ben Lamm, has entered Forbes 400 for the first time. His fortune is estimated at approximately $5,7 billion — and it was earned on a business that until recently would have sounded like the plot of a science-fiction film. Colossal works on "de-extinction" technologies — the genetic recreation of the traits of vanished animals, including the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger.
But Lamm did not stop at mammoths alone. Out of the Colossal ecosystem grew the project Astromech — an AI company created together with the geneticist George Church. Its models are meant to analyze vast biological data sets and try to predict how entire biological systems may change: from evolutionary shifts to the risks of disease and the vulnerabilities of living organisms.
In August, Astromech raised another $20 million in investment, bringing its total funding to $60 million; at the time the company was valued at approximately $3,8 billion. The foundation for the models included, among other things, the unique data accumulated by Colossal while working with the genomes of extinct and modern species.
The result is a curious evolution of the business itself: first, learn to bring animals back from the past, and then try to compute where life will go next.
A weather forecast no longer seems enough for humanity. Now we have decided to forecast evolution.
