
After five exits, the Texas entrepreneur could have kept making software. Instead, he called geneticist George Church and turned a woolly mammoth into a company-building problem.
Jennifer Kan spent years at a Nobel laureate's bench teaching enzymes new tricks. Now her fund backs the founders trying to grow the physical economy - chocolate, copper, chemicals, even data - one engineered cell at a time.
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.