Does Colossal Biosciences dire wolf creation justify its $10B+ valuation?

Summary

On Monday, the “de-extinction” startup Colossal Biosciences announced its most ambitious results to date: the dire wolf. These are creatures that have been extinct for more than 12,000 years made famous by the HBO show Game of Thrones. These white, fluffy animals live on a 2,000-acre preserve in a location so secretive that journalists, including from TechCrunch, who were invited to view the live animals were not invited to the compound itself, located in the northern United States. Instead we flew to another secretive location to see the animals with our own eyes because in this age of AI, a photo can’t be trusted. There we saw two six-month-old males named Remus and Romulus, each already weighing about 80-pounds. They looked to an inexperienced eye like very big wild dogs with slightly larger skulls and an elongated muzzle. In addition to Remus and Romulus, the company’s engineered dire wolf pack includes a female named Khaleesi, who is two months old. Colossal Biosciences dire wolf pupsImage Credits:Colossal Biosciences But the company says that there’s very little that’s ordinary about them. Colossal’s dire wolves are a result of an 18-month effort based on the genes found in the fossils of a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull of the extinct animals. When Colossal Biosciences announced its latest fundraise at a $10.2 billion valuation earlier this year, the company’s co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm told TechCrunch he believed the startup was undervalued given its actual scientific progress. Given the common startup tendency to overstate capabilities, it wasn’t easy to take Lamm’s claims at face value, particularly since Collosal’s ambitious de-extinction projects for the woolly mammoth and Tasmanian Tiger were not slated for completion until 2028. Since then, the company introduced breakthroughs that Colossal hoped would quell the skeptics’ doubts about its scientific advancements. Last month, the company announced that it engineered a mouse with mamm...