- Astromech, a company founded by Colossal and led by Ben Lamm, has raised $20 million and now has a $3.8 billion valuation.
- Since March 2026, when its value was $2 billion, the company’s valuation has almost doubled. The total amount of funding it has received is now $60 million.
- The AI of the astromech studies animals such as cancer-resistant elephants and long-lived whales in order to predict how biological systems might deteriorate.
The AI company Astromech, which originated from Ben Lamm’s Colossal Biosciences, has completed a $20 million funding round at a $3.8 billion valuation.
This round was led by Bob Nelsen, co-founder of ARCH Venture Partners and an early investor in Illumina and Juno Therapeutics. Other investors included Peak 6, NeoGenesis Capital, Builders VC, and CA Investments.
“Biology runs the world, and historically, we have only reacted to it. Astromech is building the AI system predicting how living systems will change and where they are most likely to break,” said Lamm.
This round brings Astromech’s total funding to $60 million and has seen its valuation nearly double to $2 billion from $1 billion in March 2026. Tech Funding News has also noted that Colossal experienced similar increases in valuation, usually occurring before launching its commercial products.
From reviving extinct species to predicting future ones
Astromech was established in September 2025 and employs AI trained on genomic data provided by Colossal to predict changes and weaknesses in living systems; the technology has applications in the fields of conservation, disease, drug resistance, and food supply.
The company was founded by Lamm, who is also the CEO of Colossal, and George Church, a geneticist from Harvard who co-founded Colossal in 2021.
Colossal is working to bring back extinct species using ancient DNA, while Astromech is attempting to predict future changes in biology. Astromech uses animals with extreme traits as natural experiments, and its first public project involves a study of longevity in which cancer-resistant Asian elephants, 200-year-old bowhead whales, and Brandt’s bats, which live a long time, are compared with their shorter-lived relatives to identify protective factors.
It would be possible to test this regulatory gene sequence in humans if it were always present in species resistant to cancer but absent in others.
Church said most of the variation that matters for complex traits “is regulatory rather than coding,” which is why reconstructing ancestral regulatory states is central to explaining traits like longevity.
Competitors, traction, and an awkward overlap
Astromech has mapped 46 genes that are associated with cellular maintenance, cancer resistance, and longevity. Although this is more specific than most firms are at this stage, it is still a research achievement.
The startup operates in the same area as Insitro, a company that has raised more than $700 million for machine learning-based drug discovery, and Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s protein-structure spinout, which is valued at over $2 billion.
While other companies are concentrating on developing new drugs, Astromech takes a step earlier in the process by attempting to predict potential failures in biological systems before drug targets are identified.
Although Colossal took five years and hundreds of millions of dollars and still managed to attract investors, Astromech is now seeking similar support, but in this case, for its predictive forecasts rather than de-extinction, using its list of 46 genes as the main evidence for outsiders.
