Only in 2025 could a Silicon Valley contrarian, a Y2K icon, a Marvel star, the Lord of the Rings creator, and the mastermind behind the Red Wedding come together for one mission: to bring prehistoric beasts back to life.
This story brings together everything we love about culture: Roman history, Jurassic Park, high fantasy, biotech moonshots, and a wolf born in a lab named Khaleesi. Welcome to Colossal Biosciences — the startup actually doing Jurassic Park, but with influencers, CIA money, and a sketch from George R.R. Martin on the wall.
Dire wolves are real now
Colossal’s latest creation is the dire wolf – an actual, genetically engineered animal built using modern science and ancient DNA.
Using CRISPR editing, they spliced gray wolf genes to re-create key traits of the long-extinct dire wolf: bigger bones, broader skull, thicker coat. The result? Three pups — Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi (I’m not crying, R.R. Martin is)— born via dog surrogates, now living, breathing symbols of how weird and wild biotech has gotten.
And yes, Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin cried when he met them. Then, he sketched one. That drawing now hangs, framed, inside Colossal’s headquarters. Because when fiction becomes biotech reality, fan art becomes lab decor.
They raised $225 million, the investor list makes zero sense
— which is exactly what makes it perfect.
Colossal has raised over $225 million, and its cap table reads like a nerdy fever dream:
Paris Hilton, pink icon turned science-core angel investor;
Peter Thiel, the billionaire futurist with a lifelong obsession with immortality;
Chris, Liam & Luke Hemsworth, lifting the Thor hammer to bring back the Tasmanian tiger;
George R.R. Martin, official dire wolf ambassador — a man whose books are soaked in blood, but still cried when he met the puppies. Old softie.
And then there’s Thomas Tull, producer of Godzilla and Jurassic World (not good as Park, but we still like it), and Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings trilogy creator, now shifting from Nazgûl to dinos – he want’s to rule them all.
Add in Tony Robbins, motivational guru now hyping up ancient beasts; the Winklevoss twins, maybe just trying to beat Zuckerberg at bringing back the Ice Age.
But wait — the CIA’s own venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, t is also on the cap table. Apparently Langley believes the future of biosecurity might involve mammoths, dire wolves, and a genetic toolkit that works just as well on DNA as it does on data.
Make this into an HBO series before Netflix steals it.
ROI: return of Iguanodon
Similar to immortality startups, flying cars, and other slightly delusional Delorians, the ROI on bringing back extinct creatures should make us a little nervous.
According to founders Ben Lamm and George Church the dire wolf isn’t the business — it’s the demo. A living, breathing headline meant to prove out Colossal’s larger ambition: building the synthetic biology infrastructure for the future of life itself. Less about the wolf, more about the tools that made it possible.
Here’s where the commercial runway actually starts to look like a viable market:
- climate and rewilding services: engineered species deployed to restore broken ecosystems
- biotech licensing: gene-editing tech for agriculture, pharma, and conservation
- genetics-as-a-service: DNA treated like code, with traits as licensable IP
- media and branded lifeforms: imagine Jurassic Park, but this time you can actually license the creature
The dire wolf is the trailer. The platform is the feature. If it works, Colossal won’t just be the company that brought back Ice Age beasts — it’ll be the AWS of synthetic biology, quietly powering the backend of the biological economy.
Life finds a way.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t find a way to turn into the villain.
