Ben Lamm didn’t set out to build one of the most headline-grabbing biotech companies in the world. He set out to make the impossible plausible. Along the way, he’s done both—assembling unlikely teams, raising tens of millions in funding, and advancing projects that sound more like speculative fiction than science.
This year, that trajectory earned him a spot on the TIME100 Next list—an annual look at rising global leaders reshaping their fields. His inclusion didn’t come with a generic write-up, but with a tribute from geneticist George Church, who described Lamm’s ambition as “colossal”—a fitting word, given their shared role in founding Colossal Biosciences. The company is best known for its efforts to revive extinct species, from the woolly mammoth and the debated “dire wolf” prototype to its most recent target: the South Island giant moa.
As Colossal has grown into a biotech behemoth with a media footprint to match, Lamm has been building a second company—this time, in the shadows. Astromech, a stealth AI venture focused on computational genomics, has already secured $30 million in funding. While Colossal has spent the past several years courting headlines, Astromech is doing the opposite. No product demos, no TED Talks, no media blitz. Just job postings referencing “phylogenetic inference” and “synthesis design,” and a website with the aesthetic of what can only be described as a retro-futurist arcade.
Yet the connective tissue between the two companies is unmistakable. Both depend on highly complex, interdisciplinary collaboration. Both are structured around long-term timelines. Both require wrestling with immense computational challenges. And both are driven by Lamm’s belief that the next wave of scientific progress will come from recombining fields that don’t traditionally talk to each other.
In his writeup, Church emphasized Lamm’s instinct for assembling people whose worlds rarely intersect—wildlife biologists, machine learning engineers, policymakers, spiritual advisors, and frontier investors—not as symbolism, but as infrastructure for turning radical ideas into reality. That instinct shows up across Lamm’s ventures, from Colossal’s public-facing prototypes to Astromech’s recruitment of specialists in protein folding, sequence reconstruction, and gene regulation. His is not a single-lab vision. It’s a coalition vision.
If it sounds like a lot, it is. But Lamm’s reputation for juggling complex, fast-moving ventures is well-earned. Before Colossal and Astromech, he founded companies like Hypergiant, Conversable, and Chaotic Moon—each pushing the frontier in its category, from AI to creative tech to conversational platforms—and all ultimately acquired by larger players
Unlike some serial founders, though, Lamm hasn’t used success as a reason to go smaller or safer. His current projects aim squarely at existential challenges: biodiversity collapse, ecological restoration, the ability to rewrite life itself. It’s no coincidence that Colossal launched with a built-in philanthropic arm—the Colossal Foundation—to support endangered species recovery and ecosystem repair alongside its headline-grabbing moonshots.
And while Astromech hasn’t spelled out its ambitions publicly, its architecture suggests similar depth. The stealth mode isn’t about secrecy for secrecy’s sake. It’s about breathing room—space to build an AI platform powerful enough to model biological systems without being rushed to market before the science is ready.
That dual-track strategy—high visibility on one side, tight-lipped development on the other—may prove to be Lamm’s signature. It also explains why the TIME100 Next recognition hits differently. It isn’t just about the media moments or the prototypes. It’s about building enduring infrastructure at the intersection of biology and computation—and doing it with a level of coordination most startups can’t touch.
George Church may have put it best: people didn’t just admire what Colossal created. They fell in love with it. And in the background, another system is coming online—no less ambitious, no less speculative, and very possibly just as transformative.
