Mammoth task for unicorn that wants to bring back the dodo

Abiotechnology start-up that promises to resurrect woolly mammoths is now the first “de-extinction unicorn”, with a valuation said to be more than $1bn before bringing back a single lost species. Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based start-up, is making public a new round of investment this week that will help fund its effort to bring back perhaps the most famously extinct animal of them all: the dodo.

Reintroducing mammoths to Alaska or dodos to Mauritius sounds unrealistic, even silly, and has drawn scepticism from paleo-geneticists and other experts who worry that the effects of de-extinction would be unpredictable. Yet Colossal has continued to draw support from investors, including celebrities, and on Tuesday announced another $150m for a total of $225m since 2021. A person familiar with the company said with the latest round, the start-up is valued at about $1.5bn.

For some investors, a live dodo is less important than the scientific breakthroughs generated in the push to de-extinction. “Along the lines of being able to bring a species back, we’re going to learn things we can’t learn in a wet lab,” said Thomas Tull, a tech investor who produced the movie Jurassic World and made money investing in medical uniform company Figs.

The influx of cash comes as the financial world has taken a new interest in the biodiversity crisis. The UN conference on biodiversity in December 2022 attracted representatives from Wall Street, and global banks are dabbling with “debt for nature” swaps that would protect vulnerable ecosystems in exchange for renegotiating sovereign debt in developing nations. Colossal is positioning itself as a solution to the damage done to the natural world and co-founder Ben Lamm says we have the opportunity to reverse human-inflicted biodiversity loss. Just how the restoration of long-dead species would pay off for investors is an open question. The company suggests promising areas for future spinoffs might include gene editing and artificial wombs.

Company insiders regularly bring up the space race when discussing the company’s prospects as an example of a seemingly impossible goal that was not only reached but also generated inventions that we still use today. “What’s nice about these extinct species is they are systems problems,” said Lamm in an interview. Solving a systems problem requires innovation in multiple areas and therefore creates breakthroughs that can lead to more spin-offs. “It’s like the moon landing. That was a systems problem.”

Lamm, who cofounded Colossal with Harvard University geneticist George Church, also believes that Colossal’s goal gives the company a competitive edge in recruiting people who would rather research vanished beasts than less exotic projects. “You can work on yeast or you can work on bringing back an extinct species,” he said.

The dodo is the third vanished animal on Colossal’s de-extinction to-do list. In March, the start-up said it would bring back the woolly mammoth and in August added a pledge to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger, or the thylacine, which was declared extinct in the 1930s.

The company says it’s on track to produce mammoth calves by 2028.

The steady stream of announcements has captivated a collection of celebrity investors, including Paris Hilton and motivational speaker Tony Robbins, who don’t necessarily confer an aura of scientific seriousness. But Colossal has also enlisted less famous investors with considerable pedigree, though it is unclear how involved they are.

“Strategically, it’s less about the mammoths and more about the capability” to engineer animals and plants, the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, said in a September blog post when it invested in Colossal.

“They’re solving complex problems, and we’ve been pleased with the progress so far,” said Jim Breyer, an early backer of Facebook who invests in Colossal through his firm Breyer Capital. “Long term, there will be significant revenue opportunities around sustainability, conservation and rewilding.”

Tom Chi of At One Ventures, a founding member at Google X, Alphabet’s innovation lab, is the only independent member of Colossal’s three-member board. He has made ambitious investments in other difficult endeavours such as Helios Labs, which seeks to extract metals and oxygen from the surface of the moon and Mars.

Chi dismisses the focus on Hollywood investors. “Are they mucking with the way we do the science? No,” he said in an interview. In fact, Chi said, the science behind Colossal was so tough that many of its backers didn’t fully understand it.

“It would probably take eight hours to explain to a celebrity.”

Traditional investors remain sceptical about the field. “I think the de-extinction angle might hold promise for scientific discovery, but probably very hard for venture in terms of market, cost and speed to scale,” said Helen Liang, managing partner of Founders X Ventures. “The bigger question is what business values could be unlocked and the justification on the cost of capital in doing that.”

The dodo was a flightless bird that was roughly twice the size of a turkey and lived on the island of Mauritius. The last known one was killed in the late 1600s, after people arrived on the island and hunted the bird for food, overtook their habitat and introduced pigs and monkeys that ate their eggs.

Just getting a dodo sample was a painful undertaking for Colossal.

Beth Shapiro, the company’s lead palaeo-geneticist and a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, has been trying to extract genetic material from the dead bird for most of her career.

She’s scraped the inside of dodo skulls and sweated in sugar plantations on Mauritius. She finally got lucky with a well-preserved specimen kept in a Danish museum, and Colossal now says it has the only known high-quality, complete dodo DNA.

Resurrecting the bird would be just the start. Shapiro warned that any dodo released into the wild would need to be protected from the predators that wiped them out centuries ago.

Small islands off the coast of Mauritius, where giant tortoises have also been reintroduced, could be a good place.

“Once we have functional dodos,” she said, “we’ll have to create a habitat that can sustain them.”