When asked how much revenue there was in bringing back extinct animals, Ben Lamm doesn’t hesitate: $1.7 trillion, the CEO of biotech Colossal says his “accounting nerds” have calculated.
Add in the ability to protect sensitive ecologies and map the evolution of species and diseases, and the money-making potential is “immeasurable,” Lamm said on Semafor’s Compound Interest show. Lamm said Colossal has no plans to build a theme park for woolly mammoths and dire wolves; even setting aside the risks, he said zoos feel “transactional.”
Instead, the money will come from where it always does — selling services to big companies and governments. Colossal signed what Lamm called a nine-figure deal with the Emirati government to help manage biodiversity and is working with a dozen other countries to develop a “biodiversity credit score” that he thinks could underpin new financial markets: “There’s a world where carbon credits and biodiversity credits merge into nature credits,” he said. Colossal is licensing its gene-editing technology to other labs and has spun out four businesses, the largest of which, a biologic predictive engine called Astromech, is valued at more than $2 billion.
Colossal did clone Tom Brady’s dog, but even in its veterinary arm, Lamm sees more promise in using its data to help design vaccines and model disease evolution than in selling directly to consumers.
“The end-to-end systems model that allows you to make a woolly mammoth can also directly be applied to making drought-resistant animals or disease-resistant plants or microbes that eat plastics,” Lamm said.
Colossal doesn’t work directly with the US government, though Lamm cryptically mentioned work on bioweapons that “may not have made it into a press release” and said Colossal has some technologies it doesn’t sell internationally.
There is, of course, media. Lamm said Colossal had been approached about scripted content and said he doesn’t see the company as competing with scientific journals like Nature, but rather with platforms like TikTok for “the souls of our youth.” It’s mining attention like any startup: Lamm said last week at Semafor World Economy that a third of the company’s investors learned about the company because their kids mentioned its de-extinction work.