Astromech, the stealth artificial intelligence company co-founded by Colossal Biosciences chief executive Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church, has raised a fresh $20 million at a $3.8 billion valuation, bringing total capital raised to $60 million as it develops AI models that attempt to forecast how biological systems change over time.
An AI Built On Evolution, Not Language
Rather than train on text or images, Astromech ingests genomic, evolutionary and functional biology data spanning both living and extinct species. The company says its systems draw on roughly 3.8 billion years of evolutionary history to identify how traits emerge, where biological systems become vulnerable, and how organisms, diseases or populations could change in the future. Potential applications include drug discovery, aging research, disease resistance, conservation biology and pandemic preparedness.
Colossal DNA
Astromech is a spinout from Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based genetic engineering company Lamm and Church founded in 2021 to de-extinct species including the woolly mammoth, thylacine and dodo. Colossal itself was last valued at $10.2 billion after a $200 million Series C. Astromech is incorporated in Delaware and remains formally in stealth mode; its earlier $30 million raise closed in September 2025.
AI For Life Sciences Keeps Compounding
The round lands as venture investors continue to price predictive biology as one of AI's most valuable frontier applications. Peers such as Anthropic-partnered protein binder work with Adaptyv and Veeda AI have all raised at meaningful valuations in recent weeks. Astromech's research-heavy phase means substantial scientific validation will be required before its forecasts can be applied commercially at scale, but the round underscores investor conviction that a foundation model for biology is worth pursuing.
Reporting based on coverage from Yahoo Finance / ACCESS Newswire, TheNextWeb, Dealroom and D CEO Magazine.