A 22-month-old startup that is helping millions of blue- and gray-collar workers in India learn new skills and find jobs has become the youngest firm to join the coveted unicorn status in the world’s second-largest internet market.

Apna announced on Thursday that it has raised $100 million in a round led by Tiger Global. The new round — a Series C — valued Apna at $1.1 billion. TechCrunch reported last month that Tiger Global, an existing investor in Apna, was in talks to lead a $100 million financing round in the startup at the unicorn valuation.

Owl Ventures, Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Maverick Ventures and GSV Ventures also participated in the new round, which is the third investment secured by Apna this year. Apna was valued at $570 million in its Series B round in June this year.

The investors’ excitement comes as Apna has demonstrated an impressive growth in recent months. The startup has amassed over 16 million users on its 15-month-old eponymous Android app, up from 10 million in June this year.

Indian cities are home to hundreds of millions of low-skilled workers who hail from villages in search of work. Many of them have lost their jobs amid the coronavirus pandemic that has slowed several economic activities in the South Asian market.

Apna has built a platform that provides a community to these workers. In the community, they engage with each other, exchange notes to perform better at interviews and share tips to negotiate better compensation.

On top of this, Apna connects these workers to potential employers. In an interview with TechCrunch, Apna founder and chief executive Nirmit Parikh said more than 150,000 employers — including Zomato, Bharti AXA, Urban Company, BYJU’S, PhonePe, Burger King, Delhivery, Teamlease and G4S Global — are on the platform, and over 5 million jobs are active.

The startup, whose name is inspired from a cheerful 2019 Bollywood song, has facilitated over 18 million job interviews in the past 30 days, he said. Apna is currently operational in 28 Indian cities.

The idea for Apna came, Parikh has said, after he was puzzled to find that even as there are hundreds of millions of blue- and gray-collar workers in India, locating them when you need assistance with a task often proves very difficult.

Prior to starting Apna, Parikh, who previously worked at Apple, met these workers and went undercover as an electrician and floor manager to understand the problems they were facing. The problem, he found, was the disconnect. Workers had no means to find who needed them for jobs, and they were also not connected with one another. The community aspect of Apna, which now has over 70 such groups, is aimed at addressing this challenge.

The Apna app allows these workers to learn new skills to become eligible for more work opportunities. Apna has emerged as one of the fastest growing upskilling platforms — and that would explain why GSV Ventures and Owl Ventures, two high-profile firms known to back edtech startups, are investing in the Bangalore-based firm.

“Apna’s viral adoption is driven by a novel social and interactive approach to connecting employers with job seekers. We expect job seekers in search of meaningful connections and vetted opportunities to drive Apna’s continued explosive growth across India — and the world,” said Griffin Schroeder, partner at Tiger Global, in a statement.

Now the startup, which has started to monetize the platform, is ready to aggressively expand. Parikh said Apna will continue to expand to more cities in India and by early next year, Apna will begin its global expansion. Parikh said the startup is eyeing expansion in the USA, South East Asia and Middle East and Africa.

“We have already created a dent. Now we want to impact the lives of 2.3 billion,” he said. “We will require crazy amounts of resources and a world-class team to deliver. It’s a herculean task, and is going to take a village. But somebody has to solve it.”

A startup is a beautiful thing. It’s the tangible outcome of an idea birthed in a garage or on the back of a napkin. But ask any founder what really proves their startup has taken off, and they will almost instantly say it’s when they win their first customer.

That’s easier said than done, though, because winning that first customer will take a lot more than an Ivy-educated founder and/or a celebrity investor pool.

To begin with, you’ll have to craft a strong ideal customer profile to know your customer’s pain points, while developing a competitive SWOT analysis to scope out alternatives your customers can go to.

You’ll also need to create a shortlist of influencers who have your customer’s trust, identify their decision-makers who make the call to buy (or not), and create a mapped list of goals that align your customer’s goals to yours.

Understanding and executing on these things can guarantee you that first customer win, provided you do them well and with sincerity. Your investors will also see the fruits of your labor and be comforted knowing their dollars are at good work.

Let’s see how:

1. Craft the ideal customer profile (ICP)

The ICP is a great framework for figuring out who your target customer is, how big they are, where they operate, and why they exist. As you write up your ICP, you will soon see the pain points you assumed about them start to become more real.

To create an ICP, you will need to have a strong articulation of the problem you are trying to solve and the customers that experience this problem the most. This will be your baseline hypothesis. Then, as you develop your ICP, keep testing your baseline hypothesis to weed out inaccurate assumptions.

Getting crystal clear here will set you up with the proper launchpad. No shortcuts.

Here’s how to get started:

Develop an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) framework.Identify three target customers that fit your defined ICP.Write a problem statement for each identified target customer.Prioritize the problem statement that resonates with your product the most.Lock on the target customer of the prioritized problem statement.

Practice use case:

You are the co-founder at an upcoming SaaS startup focused on simplifying the shopping experience in car showrooms so buyers enjoy the process. What would your ICP look like?

2. Develop the SWOT

The SWOT framework cannot be overrated. This is a great structure to articulate who your competitors are and how you show up against them. Note that your competitors can be direct or indirect (as an alternative), and it’s important to categorize these buckets correctly.

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AgBiome, developing products from microbial communities, brought in a $116 million Series D round as the company prepares to pad its pipeline with new products.

The company, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., was co-founded in 2012 by a group including co-CEOs Scott Uknes and Eric Ward, who have known each other for over 30 years. They created the Genesis discovery platform to capture diverse microbes for agricultural applications, like crop protection, and screen the strains for the best assays that would work for insect, disease and nematode control.

“The microbial world is immense,” said Uknes, who explained that there is estimated to be a trillion microbes, but only 1% have been discovered. The microbes already discovered are used by humans for things like pharmaceuticals, food and agriculture. AgBiome built its database in Genesis to house over 100,000 microbes and every genome in every microbe was sequenced into hundreds of strains.

The company randomly selects strains and looks for the best family of strains with a certain activity, like preventing fungus on strawberries, and creates the product.

Its first fungicide product, Howler, was launched last year and works on more than 300 crop-disease combinations. The company saw 10x sales growth in 2020, Uknes told TechCrunch. As part of farmers’ integrated pest program, they often spray fungicide applications 12 times per year in order to yield fruits and vegetables.

Due to its safer formula, Howler can be used as the last spray in the program, and its differentiator is a shorter re-entry period — farmers can spray in the morning and be able to go back out in the field in the afternoon. It also has a shorter pre-harvest time of four hours after application. Other fungicides on the market today require seven days before re-entry and pre-harvest, Uknes explained.

AgBiome aims to add a second fungicide product, Theia, in early 2022, while a third, Esendo was submitted for Environmental Protection Agency registration. Uknes expects to have 11 products, also expanding into insecticides and herbicides, by 2025.

The oversubscribed Series D round was co-led by Blue Horizon and Novalis LifeSciences and included multiple new and existing investors. The latest investment gives AgBiome over $200 million in total funding to date. The company’s last funding round was a $65 million Series C raised in 2018.

While competitors in synthetic biology often sell their companies to someone who can manufacture their products, Uknes said AgBiome decided to manufacture and commercialize the products itself, something he is proud of his team for being able to do.

“We want to feed the world responsibly, and these products have the ability to substitute for synthetic chemicals and provide growers a way to protect their crops, especially as consumers want natural, sustainable tools,” he added.

The company has grown to over 100 employees and will use the new funding to accelerate production of its two new products, building out its manufacturing capacity in North America and expanding its footprint internationally. Uknes anticipates growing its employee headcount to 300 in the next five years.

AgBiome anticipates rolling up some smaller companies that have a product in production to expand its pipeline in addition to its organic growth. As a result, Uknes said he was particular about the kind of investment partners that would work best toward that goal.

Przemek Obloj, managing partner at Blue Horizon, was introduced to the company by existing investors. His firm has an impact fund focused on the future of food and began investing in alternative proteins in 2016 before expanding that to delivery systems in agriculture technology, he said.

Obloj said AgBiome is operating in a $60 billion market where the problems include products that put toxic chemicals into the ground that end up in water systems. While the solution would be to not do that, not doing that would mean produce doesn’t grow as well, he added.

The change in technology in agriculture is enabling Uknes and Ward to do something that wasn’t possible 10 years ago because there was not enough compute or storage power to discover and sequence microbes.

“We don’t want to pollute the Earth, but we have to find a way to feed 9 billion people by 2050,” Obloj said. “With AgBiome, there is an alternative way to protect crops than by polluting the Earth or having health risks.”

SoftBank Group Corp. is doubling down on its commitment to Latin America.

Today, the Japanese investment conglomerate is announcing the launch of the SoftBank Latin America Fund II, its second dedicated private investment fund focused on tech companies located in LatAm. SoftBank is launching the new fund with an initial $3 billion commitment.

“Fund II will explore options to raise additional capital,” SoftBank said in a statement.

The new fund builds upon SoftBank’s $5 billion Latin America Fund, which was first announced in March 2019 and was formerly called the Innovation Fund with an initial $2 billion in committed capital.

According to the firm, that fund has generated a net IRR of 85% — with SoftBank having invested $3.5 billion in 48 companies with a fair value of $6.9 billion as of June 30. SoftBank has invested in 15 unicorns out of that fund, including proptech startup QuintoAndar, Rappi, Mercado Bitcoin, Gympass and MadeiraMadeira. Recently, it co-led a $350 million Series D round in Argentine personal finance management app Ualá.

The firm also says it has participated in “significant value uplift” for portfolio companies, including 4.4x each for Kavak and VTEX; 2.6x for QuintoAndar and 3.5x for Banco Inter (as of June 30).

It has backed companies across the region including in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Argentina and Ecuador.

Marcelo Claure, Executive VP and COO of SoftBank Group, leads the SoftBank Latin America Funds. Managing Partners Shu Nyatta and Paulo Passoni run the region’s investment team. Operating Partner Alex Szapiro, also head of Brazil for SoftBank, leads the fund’s operations team.

Combined, the investment and operations teams total over 60 people who operate out of Miami, São Paulo and Mexico City.

Fund II intends to back technology-enabled companies across countries and industries at every stage of their development, from seed to public, throughout Latin America, with a focus on e-commerce, digital financial services, healthcare, education, blockchain and enterprise software, among others. 

In a statement, SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son described Latin America as “one of the most important economic regions in the world.”

“SoftBank will continue to drive technology adoption that will benefit hundreds of millions of people in this part of the world,” he said. “There is so much innovation and disruption taking place in Latin America, and I believe the business opportunities there have never been stronger. Latin America is a critical part of our strategy – this is why we are expanding our presence and doubling down on our commitment with Marcelo at the helm.”

Claure said the success and returns from the SoftBank Latin America Fund “far exceeded” the firm’s expectations. Looking ahead, he expects that 2022 will be the “biggest IPO year” in the region’s history.

Earlier this year, TechCrunch looked at why global investors were flocking to Latin America. At that time, Nyatta told me that technology in LatAm is often more about inclusion rather than disruption.

“The vast majority of the population is underserved in almost every category of consumption. Similarly, most businesses are underserved by modern software solutions,” Nyatta explained. “There’s so much to build for so many people and businesses. In San Francisco, the venture ecosystem makes life a little better for individuals and businesses who are already living in the future. In LatAm, tech entrepreneurs are building the future for everyone else.”

London-based PassFort, a SaaS provider that helps business meet compliance requirements such as KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) reporting, has closed a $16.2 million Series A led by US growth equity fund, Level Equity.

The 2015-founded startup‘s existing investors OpenOcean, Episode 1 and Entrepreneur First also participated in the round. The Series A is a mix of equity and debt, with $4.89M worth of venture debt being provided by Shard Credit Partners.

PassFort tells TechCrunch it now has 54 customers in total, saying the majority are in the digital payments space. It’s also selling its SaaS to customers in foreign exchange, banking and (ofc) crypto. It also touts some “major” customer wins preceding this raise — name-checking the likes of Curve and WorldRemit.

The new funding will be put towards stepping up its growth globally — with PassFort noting it’s hired a new C-suite for its growth team to lead the planned global push.

It’s also hiring more staff in business development and marketing, and plans to significantly bump spending across marketing, sales and customer support roles as it gears up to scale up.

“On the product side we are developing the solution to meet the demands of the changing digital economy and the threats it faces,” says CEO and co-founder Donald Gillies. “This means investing heavily into our new compliance policy cloud, system-to-system integrations with market-leading CRM and transaction monitoring systems as well as building a data team capable of deriving valuable real-time insights across our customer network.”

PassFort says its revenues grew ~2.5x over the past 12 months.

Gillies credits COVID-19 with really hitting the digital “accelerator” and driving adoption for compliance tools, as fintechs and regulated businesses look to streamline their approach to customer on-boarding and risk monitoring.

Alongside this accelerated digital transformation, he also points to a rise in cyber crime and increasingly sophisticated financial crime driving demand for compliance tools, and a “huge” rise in the number of regulations announced since COVID-19, noting: “Estimates from those who track regulatory changes stated that by August 2020, more than 1,330 COVID-19 related regulatory announcements had been made globally by regulators.”

As well as serving up an “always-on picture of risk”, as PassFort’s marketing puts it, the platform offers a single place to access and manage customer profiles, while also centralizing records for audit purposes.

PassFort’s SaaS also tracks efficiency — supporting customers to see where holdups in the onboarding process might be, to help with customer experience as well as the wider support it offers to compliance teams.

The startup says its integration model is such that it can “ingest datasets from any provider and interoperate with any system”, so — for example — it has pre-built connectors to more than 25 data providers at this stage.

It also offers a single API to integrate with a customer’s existing back-office system.

Another feature of the SaaS it flags is a focus on “low to no-code” — to increase accessibility and help customers with high complexity in their compliance needs (such as multiple customer types, multiple product lines and multi-jurisdictions. This includes a smart policy builder with a ‘drag and drop’ interface to help customers configure complex workflows.

On the competitive side, PassFort names Dublin-based Fenergo as its closest competitor but says it’s targeting a broader market — likening its own product to ‘Salesforce for compliance teams’ and saying its goal is to get the SaaS into the hands of “every financial crime and compliance team in the world”.

Commenting in a statement, Charles Chen, partner at Level Equity — who’s now joining PassFort’s board of directors — added: “Over the last few years, financial institutions and organisations have experienced exponential growth in business volumes and data, which has only increased the complexity in staying compliant with ever-evolving regulatory laws. In parallel, we’ve experienced an unprecedented rise in sophisticated financial crime activity as channels into financial systems have been digitized.

“This has underscored the importance of compliance matters such as AML/KYC, yet companies often have to weigh the trade-offs between speed, compliance and automation. PassFort has solved this challenge by providing a next-generation RegTech software solution that enables customers to offer a seamless customer onboarding experience, maintain best-in-class monitoring capabilities, and balance automation vs. human touch via its intelligent orchestration engine. We are thrilled to partner with the industry thought leader in this space and look forward to supporting the company’s future growth initiatives.”

Casino video games are designed to present the home with a small edge. The island could also be massive, but St. Croix feels small and welcoming. Together with the quantity of rivalry which is around, a player might take about three to 4 several years to make the particular change with a gambler who may have a deal. 2. You could add to any build, single or multiple, by playing a card from your hand which, either alone or mixed with other playing cards on the desk which are not yet in builds, matches the prevailing seize number of the build supplied that you just hold a card which may seize the mixed build. When all the cards have been played in the ultimate deal, the final player who made a capture also wins any cards left on the table these cards are typically recognized because of the residue.

Trace on techniques: it is commonly good for the seller to carry back a face card to play final if possible; this may capture a matching face card on the table and win another desk playing cards that stay. Finally, in the following turn, you would seize the whole build with your second nine. Instance C The desk accommodates a three and a 4, constructed into a seven, and a separate line. Example. There’s a multiple 8-build of 3-5-8 on the desk, and there is also an unfastened six on the table. Instance The desk accommodates a 9-construct consisting of a five and a 4, and there can also be a three on the desk. You’ll be able to play your two, combining it with the seven-construct to make 9, and at the same time incorporate the nine on the table into the build, changing it to multiple constructs and saying “constructing 9”.

You can not just mix numerous cards that are already on the table to form a construct. Be aware additionally that when a construct comprises more than one card or sets of cards that add to the capturing number, it is multiple constructs. The capturing number can now not be modified. You’ll be able to play your 6, combining it with the three and the present construct to make brand new multiple constructs of 9. Then in your next turn provided that no one else captured, you could add one of many nines from your hand to the build. Then once more, they’re also going to lose for positive as effectively on a few of those bets. Things are going nice until Joey gets paired with another child, and it gets aggressive. read more: https://onlinecasinoswiki.com/

 

 

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We are back! From this morning, I suppose. But the news cycle doesn’t wait for our publishing schedule, so the Equity crew got together to yammer all about the Intuit-Mailchimp acquisition.

A $12 billion deal composed of stock and cash, it’s a big one. And as Mailchimp has both a history of bootsrapping and a founding story in a non-Silicon Valley city we had lots to chat about.

As a general reminder, if you do listen to the show, hit us up on Twitter as we are doing more and more of these Spaces. They are good and relaxed fun, so don’t take them too seriously. We like to have fun.

Alright, Equity is back on Wednesday with our regularly scheduled programming. Chat then!

I’ve met hundreds of founders over the years, and most, particularly early-stage founders, share one common go-to-market gripe: Pricing.

For enterprise software, traditional pricing methods like per-seat models are often easier to figure out for products that are hyperspecific, especially those used by people in essentially the same way, such as Zoom or Slack. However, it’s a different ballgame for startups that offer services or products that are more complex.

Most startups struggle with a per-seat model because their products, unlike Zoom and Slack, are used in a litany of ways. Salesforce, for example, employs regular seat licenses and admin licenses — customers can opt for lower pricing for solutions that have low-usage parts — while other products are priced based on negotiation as part of annual renewals.

Early pricing discussions should center around the buyer’s perspective and the value the product creates for them. It’s important for founders to think about the output and the outcome, and a number they can reasonably defend to customers moving forward. Of course, self-evaluation is hard, especially when you’re asking someone else to pay you for something you’ve created.

This process will take time, so here are three tips to smoothen the ride.

Pricing is a journey

Pricing is not a fixed exercise. The enterprise software business involves a lot of intangible aspects, and a software product’s perceived value, quality, and user experience can be highly variable.

The pricing journey is long and, despite what some founders might think, jumping headfirst into customer acquisition isn’t the first stop. Instead, step one is making sure you have a fully fledged product.

If you’re a late-seed or Series A company, you’re focused on landing those first 10-20 customers and racking up some wins to showcase in your investor and board deck. But when you grow your organization to the point where the CEO isn’t the only person selling, you’ll want to have your go-to-market position figured out.

Many startups fall into the trap of thinking: “We need to figure out what pricing looks like, so let’s ask 50 hypothetical customers how much they would pay for a solution like ours.” I don’t agree with this approach, because the product hasn’t been finalized yet. You haven’t figured out product-market fit or product messaging and you want to spend a lot of time and energy on pricing? Sure, revenue is important, but you should focus on finding the path to accruing revenue versus finding a strict pricing model.

Grab a red Sharpie, circle September 20 on your calendar (ooh, how old-school) and get ready to jumpstart your TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 networking experience. Sure, Disrupt’s “official” run is September 21-23, but why wait to meet other movers and shakers in your specific tech category?

We’re hosting a series of speed networking sessions to get your Disrupt kicked off on Monday, September 20. These events will take place in CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform that helps you find and connect with attendees on your must-meet list.

Pro Tip 1: If you purchased a pass, you received an email with instructions on how to access CrunchMatch. Yeah, you did.

Pro Tip 2: You still have time to buy your Disrupt 2021 pass for less than $100. Look through the Disrupt agenda and see all the programming, events and opportunity waiting for you.

We love free swag, and we’re pretty sure you do, too. So, we’ll randomly select one participant from each networking session to receive a TC swag bag. W00t!

Here are the meet and greets happening at Disrupt — choose your category and kickstart your connections.

Peer-to-Peer: Investors Connect with your community of startup investors to share connections, insights and expertise.Peer-to-Peer: Early-Stage Founders Meet the founders also launching at Disrupt to share insights and grow your support network.The Full Stack: Meet the data analysts, engineers, hackers, data scientists and software developers that power your tech.BIPOC & Women of Disrupt (and their allies): We invite all women and BIPOC (and all allies) attending Disrupt to join us for this roundup to inspire one another and grow your network.B2B 2 Connect: Are you working on products that make it easier for businesses to thrive? Meet and share ideas and others with the SaaS and Enterprise community.DNA/Tech: Meet the scientists who are using technology and engineering to produce advancements in health and biology. Planet/Impact: Passionate about making an impact on our planet? Join this networking session focused on sustainability, green tech and clean tech projects.   Money Matters: Network with the power brokers changing the face of financial services, banking and crypto.Autonobot: Discover the builders automating our lives with robotics and hardware alongside the scientists creating the artificial intelligence that powers it all.The Station: Share insights with people pushing the boundaries of mobility including drone technology, autonomous vehicles and transportation.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place on September 21-23, and these meet-and-greet sessions can help you hit the networking ground running. Make the most out of your TC Disrupt experience!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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There are a growing number of companies interested in CRISPR’s potential to upend medicine. It’s probably safe to say there’s only one company interested in using the gene-editing system to create a living, breathing woolly mammoth. Or, at least, something pretty close to it. 

That’s the primary mission of a new company called Colossal. Co-founded by maverick geneticist George Church and entrepreneur Ben Lamm, the former CEO of Hypergiant, the company aims to bring one of those creatures back to life using CRISPR to edit the genomes of existing Asian elephants. In that sense the creature would be very similar to a woolly mammoth, but would be more like an elephant-mammoth hybrid. 

It’s a project that Church’s lab has been invested in for years. But now, Church and Lamm have managed to sell investors on the idea that bringing back a mammoth is more than a science-fiction project. 

Today Colossal announced its launch and a $15 million seed round led by Thomas Tull, former CEO of Legendary Entertainment (the company responsible for the likes of Dune, Jurassic World and The Dark Knight). The round includes investments from Breyer Capital, Draper Associates, Animal Capital, At One Ventures, Jazz Ventures, Jeff Wilke, Bold Capital, Global Space Ventures, Climate Capital, Winklevoss Capital, Liquid2 Ventures, Capital Factory, Tony Robbins and First Light Capital.

“These two are a powerhouse team who have the ability to completely shift our understanding of modern genetics while developing innovative technologies that not only help bring back lost species, but advance the entire industry,” Robbins tells TechCrunch. “I am proud to be an investor in their journey.”

Lamm comes to Colossal as the founder of Hypergiant, a Texas-based AI company. He has also built and sold three other companies: Conversable (acquired by LivePerson), Chaotic Moon Studios (acquired by Accenture) and Team Chaos (acquired by Zynga). 

And big, provocative, projects are part of what Church is already famous for. 

Church created the first direct genomic sequencing method in the 1980s, and went on to help initiate the Human genome project. Now, he leads synthetic biological efforts at the Wyss Institute, where he has focused on synthesizing entire genes and genomes. 

 While CRISPR gene editing has only just entered human trials, and typically aims to edit a single disease-causing gene, Church’s projects often think far bigger — often along the lines of speeding along evolution. In 2015, Church and colleagues edited 62 genes in pig embryos (a record at the time) in an effort to create organs for human transplants. 

The company spun out of that endeavor, eGenesis, is behind on Church’s initial timeline (he predicted pig organs would be viable transplants by 2019), but the company is performing preclinical experiments on monkeys.

Resurrecting a woolly mammoth has long been in Church’s crosshairs. In 2017, his lab at Harvard University reported that they had managed to add 45 genes to the genome of an Asian elephant in an attempt to recreate the mammoth. Through a sponsored research agreement, this company will fully support the mammoth work at Church’s lab.

The company’s pitch for bringing back the Mammoth, per the press release, is to combat the effects of climate change through ecosystem restoration. Lamm expands on that point: 

“Our goal is not to just bring back the Mammoth, that’s a feat in itself,” he says. “It’s for the successful re-wilding of mammoths. If you take that toolkit, you have all the tools are your disposal to prevent extinction or to bring back critically endangered species.”

About 1 million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction. Colossal’s mammoth project, should it succeed, would suggest they have developed the capacity to both repopulate recently dead creatures, and even perform what Lamm calls “genetic rescue” to stop them from disappearing in the first place. 

Genetic rescue is the process of increasing genetic diversity in an endangered population — this could be achieved through gene-editing, or in some cases, cloning new individuals to create a wider gene pool (provided the clone and the existing animals have different enough genes). There is already some evidence that this is possible. In February 2021, a black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann became the first cloned endangered species native to North America. She was cloned from the DNA housed in frozen tissue samples collected in 1988. 

Bringing back extinct species might help combat a consequence of climate change, but it doesn’t solve the root problem. As long as the human-based drivers of climate change remain in-tact, there’s not much hope for a newly reborn creature that was killed by climate change the first time; in fact, fluctuating climates were one reason megafauna died off in the first place.

And, there could be serious ecosystem ramifications from re-wilding long-dead species, like spreading novel disease, displacing existing species and altering the actual landscape (elephants are ecosystem engineers, after all). 

If tackling biodiversity is part of Colossal’s core pitch, why go directly for the mammoth when there are species that might be saved right now? Lamm notes that the company may also try to edit the genomes of Asian elephants to make them more resilient; however, the mammoth project remains the company’s “north star.”

The argument, from Lamm’s perspective, is that the mammoth project is a moonshot. Even if the company shoots for the moon and lands among the stars, they will have to develop proprietary technology for de-extinction that might then be licensed or sold to potential buyers. 

“It’s very similar to the Apollo program — which was a literal moonshot. A bunch of technologies were created along the way. Things like GPS, the fundamentals of the internet and semiconductors. All those were highly monetizable,” he says.  

In short, the mammoth project is more like an incubator for developing a host of intellectual property. That might include projects like artificial wombs or other applications of CRISPR, Lamm notes. These products will still face massive scientific hurdles — existing artificial womb projects aren’t even near entering human trials — but those hurdles might be slightly more achievable than living, breathing beings. 

Not that Colossal doesn’t have plenty of interim plans while that research is being done. The company is also out to create an especially memorable brand along the way. Lamm says you could think of the brand as “Harvard meets MTV.” 

Though there’s no company that Lamm says is a direct comparison to Colossal, he mentioned several large space brands and agencies, like Blue Origin, SpaceX and notably NASA in our conversation — “I think that NASA is the best brand the United States ever made,” he notes. 

“If you look at SpaceX and Blue Origin and Virgin, my 91-year-old grandmother knew these guys went to space. ULA and other people have been launching rockets and putting satellites up there for decades — nobody cared. These companies did a great job of bringing the public in,” he says. 

It’s all a bit reminiscent of Elon Musk’s plan for sending humans to Mars, although Starship (the vehicle that’s supposed to get us there) hasn’t moved beyond prototype test flights. 

The big ideas, says Lamm, draw in the public. The intellectual property developed along the way can pacify investors in the meantime. The perspective is inescapably sci-fi, but perhaps it’s supposed to be that way. 

And that’s not to say that the company isn’t absolutely dead-set on bringing a mammoth to life. This capital, says Lamm, should be sufficient to help develop a viable mammoth embryo. They’re aiming to have the first set of calves born in the next four to six years.