Tagged: climate-adaptation
3 results
Colossal Biosciences
Colossal Biosciences is a Dallas-based genetic engineering company using de-extinction science - ancient DNA, CRISPR gene editing, and reproductive technology - to revive lost species like the woolly mammoth, thylacine, dodo, and dire wolf, and to apply the same tools to protecting endangered wildlife. Co-founded in 2021 by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church, it became Texas' first decacorn with a $10.2 billion valuation and has spun out companies in computational biology and plastic degradation.
The Cheapest Way to Beat the Ocean Is to Stop Fighting It
Terranova is pitching a counterintuitive answer to coastal flooding: instead of walling the water out, raise the ground up. Its $92 million quote to lift an entire low-lying district four feet above the floodplain undercuts the $500-900 million price tag of a conventional concrete seawall by roughly an order of magnitude. This story breaks down the math behind that claim, tests it against the only city that ever actually did it at scale — Galveston, Texas, which jacked up 2,146 buildings after the 1900 hurricane for the inflation-adjusted equivalent of about $94 million — and weighs the hidden costs, disruption, and engineering risk that a sticker price alone never shows.
Laurence Allen
Laurence Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Terranova, a Berkeley-based startup building autonomous terraforming robots that lift flood-prone land out of harm's way by injecting wood waste slurry deep underground. A UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering graduate (2024) who conceived the idea during a 2021 SpaceX internship, Allen launched the company — originally called Levitree — to save his own hometown of San Rafael, California, which floods to waist depth several times a decade. Terranova closed a $7M seed round in late 2025 at a $25.1M valuation led by Congruent Ventures and Outlander, and can lift one acre of land by one foot per day at a fraction of the cost of traditional seawalls. Allen was named to the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Energy & Green Tech, took a leave from his Stanford master's program to scale Terranova full-time, and entered 2026 actively pursuing commercial elevation projects across the Bay Area for flood prevention, development, and wetland restoration.