‘Lord of the Rings’ director piles $10m into Dodo de-extinction startup

The company has drawn skepticism from paleo-geneticists and the concept of bringing back the dodo lends itself easily to ridicule.

Film director Peter Jackson and his partner, producer Fran Walsh, are the latest wealthy celebrities to throw support behind de-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences Inc. The couple invested $10 million in the company known for trying to bring back animals from the dodo to the woolly mammoth.

The filmmaker, famed for making the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, is backing the biotechnology company as he seeks to prevent species from extinction in his native New Zealand, according to his publicist.

“We weren’t really trying to raise more capital,” Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Texas-based Colossal, said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “But we just got so many people pinging us, and then we had Peter and a few folks that were really excited about the business that we thought could be strategically helpful.”

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Jackson’s investment brings the total raised by the biotechnology company to $235 million since Lamm and Harvard University geneticist George Church founded it in 2021. Colossal’s core mission is to bring back species that have gone extinct — including the woolly mammoth, dodo and Tasmanian tiger — and provide returns through spinning out the genetic engineering technology developed along the way.

The company has drawn skepticism from paleo-geneticists and the concept of bringing back the dodo lends itself easily to ridicule. But that hasn’t stopped investors from supporting it. Winklevoss Capital Management, motivational speaker Tony Robbins and Paris Hilton, among others, are already getting returns in the form of equity from Colossal’s two spinoffs, Lamm said. Software company Form Bio launched in 2022 with $30 million in financing, while plastic degradation company Breaking raised $10.5 million from investors in April. Neither are planning to raise more capital for another year, Lamm said. Colossal expects to spinout its next company in 2025, he said.

Beyond the hype around bringing extinct creatures back to life, Colossal’s work could offer some practical solutions to real world problems, according to Jamie Metzl, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a writer on genetics. “If you can create a lot of energy and excitement and enthusiasm about a big picture story, it actually gives you energy, excitement, resources to help on some smaller problems,” said Metzl, who has no involvement with the company.

The company announced on Wednesday it raised an additional $50 million from existing investors to launch the Colossal Foundation, a nonprofit focused on aiding conservation groups with its biotechnology. The foundation is currently discussing species preservation plans for endangered Sumatran rhinos, ivory-billed woodpeckers and the vaquita (a type of porpoise). “The impact that we are making to conservation is faster than we originally anticipated,” Lamm said.

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