Astromech, an evolutionary biology AI spinout from Colossal Biosciences, closed a $20 million Series B round led by biotech veteran Bob Nelsen (ARCH Venture Partners), with participation from Peak 6, NeoGenesis Capital, Builders VC, and CAZ Investments. The funding brings total capital raised to $60 million and values Astromech at $3.8 billion, nearly doubling its valuation from March 2026. Co-founded by Ben Lamm (Colossal) and Harvard geneticist George Church, the company builds predictive AI models trained on 3.8 billion years of evolutionary history to forecast where biological systems are headed and where they may become vulnerable.
Unlike conventional computational biology that analyzes organisms as they exist today, Astromech learns from how biological traits developed over time, studying evolutionary outliers (cancer-resistant Asian elephants, 200+ year bowhead whales, 40-year Brandt’s bats) to identify genetic and regulatory sources of longevity, disease resistance, and environmental stress tolerance. The company will use the funding to expand research teams, add functional genomic datasets across new species, and scale model training. Astromech is currently in deep R&D with an operational platform and initial research pipelines running, drawing on Colossal’s proprietary genome bank of extinct and living species, ancient-DNA sequencing, and computational biology infrastructure.
For biology-driven AI investors, this signals continued appetite for early-stage ventures that predict biological phenomena at scale. The $3.8B valuation on $60M raised—relative to Colossal’s de-extinction focus—reflects confidence that AI-driven biology prediction can generate moats in drug discovery, pandemic early-warning, agricultural resilience, and personalized medicine. As agentic AI moves from software engineering into wet biology, capital is flowing to teams that can read evolutionary history as training data.