Colossal Biosciences, the startup famous for trying to bring back the woolly mammoth and the dodo, is in talks to raise a fresh round of cash at a valuation that could hit $30 billion. Axios broke the news, and if the deal goes through at the top end of that range, the company's value will have tripled in about 16 months.
That's a massive jump for a five-year-old company that hasn't actually brought back anything yet. But Colossal has started making money over the past year, which is a big shift. It's also spinning off pieces of its technology into separate companies.
One of those spinouts, Astromech, an AI-driven predictive modeling firm, was already valued at $2 billion in March 2026. Another called Form Bio, a computational biology platform, pulled in $30 million in outside funding.
The UAE recently invested $60 million in Colossal, according to Wired, and both the U.S. government and the UAE have bought the company's conservation technology. That revenue stream is real, and it's growing.
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The core idea at Colossal is de-extinction: using genetic engineering to revive lost species. The company now has six target animals on its list after adding the bluebuck antelope in late April 2026. But the real money may come from everything else the company builds along the way.
Take the artificial womb technology. In a May 2026 interview, Colossal said that tech could be ready next year. The plan is to spin it off into a separate company, and the potential uses go way beyond woolly mammoths.
Human fertility treatment is one obvious application. If that works, it opens up a completely new market.
The company also has a nonprofit side called the Colossal Foundation, which formed a partnership with the University of Tasmania in late June 2026 to protect Tasmanian devils. And if Colossal ever succeeds in reintroducing extinct animals to their native habitats, it could eventually sell something called biodiversity credits. Think of them like carbon offsets, but for species.
There's even a spinout called Breaking that focuses on breaking down plastics. Colossal's core science in genetics and cellular biology turns out to have a lot of real-world uses.
Here's the honest picture: Colossal is a deep-tech story, and deep-tech stories come with huge potential and huge risk. The company is five years old and worth up to $30 billion on paper, but it hasn't actually reintroduced a single extinct species to the wild yet. The valuation is based on what investors think the technology could do, not what it has already done.
That said, the surge of interest in longevity science, renewable energy, and similar advanced technology fields is genuine, with Colossal standing out as a prominent player. The revenue it has started generating - from conservation technology sales and spinouts - gives skeptics something concrete to point to. It's no longer just a lab project.
The bottom line: If Colossal's artificial womb tech works and spins out successfully, or if biodiversity credits become a tradable market, the upside is enormous. But those are big "ifs." An investment here is a bet on the science, the spinouts, and the timing of a whole new industry. For most people, the smartest move is to watch how the story unfolds - especially the spinout valuations and the revenue growth - before getting too excited about a company that's still trying to make a mammoth.
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