Will Jones
CEO, billionaire, and tech founder Ben Lamm likes a wild idea.
He is the man who set out to bring back the woolly mammoth, worked on ideas for Nasa about interplanetary laser internet, and created biometric tattoos. He holds a number of patents, many of which show his interest in the new, novel and purely strange.
But, it’s also that mindset that encouraged him to ask why evolution is something that is only reconstructed in hindsight rather than something that can be reliably predicted. He argued that if we had enough data on animal biological evolution over time, we should be able to use that data to build an AI-based model that could also predict evolution, genetic mutations, and genetic resistance over time. He brought the idea to frequent collaborator Harvard geneticist and world-renowned scientist Dr. George Church and together they created Astromech, a unicorn company that wants to be able to predict how biology evolves over time.
“Being able to predict evolutionary change sounds crazy to everyone. But, I’m a technology guy at heart, and the more we talked about it, the more I kept thinking that this is exactly the sort of problem AI should be able to solve. And, now we are doing that,” said co-founder and CEO Lamm. “Astromech could be the next trillion dollar company because if we can solve for predictive biology, we can upturn markets.”
The backstory
Church and Lamm have been hard at work resurrecting extinct species. That effort required that they understand not just what its genome looked like, but how it diverged from related lineages over millennia including what pressures shaped it, what biological trade-offs were made, and what evolutionary decisions produced the creature that eventually disappeared from the earth. That deep, time-series genomic analysis created huge mountains of data. And, data is something Lamm, who has founded three data-centric companies, knew was just waiting to be utilized. Rather than mine it to figure out what has changed historically, he worked with Church to build an AI-engine mining the data in the other direction.
That was the birth of Astromech, an AI-based, software platform that ingests genomic and ecological data across species and time, identifies the regulatory mechanisms and selection pressures that have historically shaped biological outcomes, and uses that foundation to model where a given organism is statistically most likely to go next. The model, rightfully, treats evolution not as a chaotic, unpredictable force but as a constrained process with legible patterns. In truth, it’s searching for patterns that no human would have the capacity to identify, compare and find synergies within. If all goes according to plan, Astromech will be able to make untold predictions and recommendations about biological systems.
The expansive markets
With a premise that big, the company wasn’t in need of a market for long. In fact, investors and partners have been approaching Astromech since the story first leaked. Numerous big markets are crippled by their inability to see forward towards biological mutations. Agriculture, veterinary medicine, synthetic biology or any field where biological systems change over time in response to external pressure is, in theory, a candidate for what Astromech is building.
For instance, in the pharmaceutical industry nearly 40 to 50 percent of drug trials fail, and a striking number of those failures happen in the final, most expensive stages of development. Failure at that stage can cost companies upward of a billion dollars each. But, most often the failure comes not from lack of early insight or planning but from a resistance i.e. a tumor that finds a workaround, or a pathogen that mutates just enough to sidestep a therapeutic option, or a disease system that adapts in ways the drug’s designers didn’t see coming. Now, thanks to Lamm and Church that might be about to change.
The next steps
The odds are good that the two co-founders will figure it out.
Church, whose Harvard laboratory has been at the forefront of genomic science for decades, brings the scientific architecture that makes this possible. His work on CRISPR, large-scale genome sequencing, and synthetic biology has produced tools that now underpin entire fields of research. Meanwhile, serial entrepreneur Lamm has an uncanny instinct for finding the commercial application hiding inside scientific breakthroughs. Together, they are a powerful combination that investors are betting on. The company recently raised $40.5 million and reached a valuation of $2 billion.
The dynamic breadth of applications suggests a massive transformation for numerous industries could be underway. It is the kind of complete reimagination that could only come from the minds of two of today’s most creative, innovative and dynamic teams.