Colossal Biosciences in Talks to Nearly Triple Valuation to $20-30 Billion

Colossal Biosciences is in talks to raise new capital at a valuation between $20 billion and $30 billion, according to Axios. That would nearly triple the Dallas-based startup's $10.2 billion valuation from early 2025, a jump of roughly 16 months.

No lead investor has been named. No target raise amount has been disclosed. Colossal did not respond to requests for comment from TechCrunch.

As a private company negotiating a private funding round, nothing here has closed. Valuation talk during active fundraising can shift, and deals like this sometimes fall apart or land lower than the numbers floated in early reporting. The $20-30 billion range represents what's being discussed, not a done deal.

From Science Project to Revenue Story

Founded in 2021 by entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church, Colossal built its reputation on headline-grabbing genetic engineering: reintroducing dire wolf traits into gray wolf pups, and chasing full de-extinction of the woolly mammoth and the dodo.

The pitch to investors has changed. Lamm has told TechCrunch the company sees three revenue streams, and Axios reports Colossal has actually started generating revenue over the past year, a shift from its earlier pre-revenue funding rounds.

The company has sold its conservation technology to the U.S. government and to the United Arab Emirates, which invested $60 million in Colossal, according to Wired. That's a real government customer with real money on the table, not just speculative biodiversity credits.

Colossal has also spun off three companies: Breaking, which works on breaking down plastic waste; Form Bio, a computational biology platform that raised $30 million; and Astromech, an AI-driven predictive modeling company for biology and life sciences that was valued at $2 billion in March. Three spinouts worth real money represents a meaningfully different story than a single lab chasing mammoths on hype alone.

The Expansion Keeps Going

Colossal added the bluebuck antelope as its sixth de-extinction target in late April. Its nonprofit arm, the Colossal Foundation, struck a partnership with the University of Tasmania last month to help fight a contagious facial cancer devastating Tasmanian devils.

Lamm has also said the company plans to spin off its artificial animal womb technology, which he's argued could eventually apply to human fertility treatment. He told Rolling Stone in May that the technology is expected to be ready next year. That's a projection from the company's own CEO, not an independently verified timeline, and biotech development schedules slip often.

Analytics Insight reported Colossal has also hatched chicks from artificial eggs, a step the company says could support its effort to bring back the giant moa bird. If Colossal manages to reintroduce mammoths, dodos, or other extinct species to native habitats, Lamm has said the company could eventually sell biodiversity credits, a market mechanism similar to carbon credits. That revenue stream doesn't exist yet. It's speculative, tied to species that haven't been successfully reintroduced anywhere.

The Skeptics Have a Point

Scientists and conservation groups have pushed back on Colossal's framing since the dire wolf announcement, and that skepticism deserves a fair hearing, not a dismissal. The core objection: what Colossal produced with its dire wolf pups is genetically modified gray wolves carrying a handful of edited traits, not a resurrected extinct species in any meaningful evolutionary sense. Calling that "de-extinction" oversells the science, critics argue, and risks distracting money and attention from proven, less flashy conservation work, like habitat protection and anti-poaching enforcement, that keeps living species from disappearing in the first place.

That's a legitimate critique of the company's marketing. Analytics Insight noted that "even with billions poured into it, Colossal still gets watched pretty closely by scientists and conservation experts." Whether gene-edited hybrids meaningfully advance conservation science, or just make for great fundraising theater, remains an open scientific argument, not a settled one.

What's Actually New Here

The genuine news is the money, not the mammoths. A private biotech company nearly tripling its valuation in 16 months, backed by actual government contracts and multiple spun-off subsidiaries, signals investor appetite for deep-tech and longevity bets right now.

Whether that appetite is justified by Colossal's underlying science, or is chasing the same speculative excitement fueling other deep-tech and AI valuations, is the question serious biotech investors will be asking before any term sheet gets signed. No closing date for the round has been reported.