#Company aiming to end ‘extinction’ gets $15M in major boost

Extinction could itself become extinct — at least that’s the bold claim a new biosciences and genetics company is making.

On Monday, entrepreneur Ben Lamm and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church announced the launch of a firm called Colossal. The company says it will deploy new technology to combat “the effects of climate change through ecosystem restoration.”

According to the company’s press release, it plans to use, “breakthrough advances in CRISPR genetic engineering, a new wave of thoughtful disruptive conservation and restorative biology aims to rewild degraded ecosystems to help combat the effects of climate change and loss of biodiversity.” CRISPR is a gene-editing technology.

This is Lamm’s sixth company — most recently he helped build artificial intelligence-focused Hypergiant, which worked with clients including NASA, Apple, and Twitter, according to a statement from the company.

Church is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School as well as a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. According to the statement, he has helped create multiple breakthroughs in the genomics industry, including CRISPR. 

Colossal has secured $15 million in seed funding — investors include the Winklevoss Twins’ family office Winklevoss Capital and self-help guru Tony Robbins.