Ben Lamm

Overview

Ben Lamm is an American entrepreneur, born December 4, 1981, in Austin, Texas, who has built and sold a string of technology companies before turning to genetic engineering and, most recently, government-adjacent work on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). As founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, he became one of the most visible faces of the de-extinction movement, with a reported net worth of roughly $3.9 billion by 2026. In June 2026 he was named to the newly formed White House UAP Science Advisory Council, placing a commercial biotech and AI executive—rather than a physicist or intelligence officer—inside an official federal effort to evaluate anomalous aerial phenomena. Lamm's inclusion is notable less for any personal claim about UFOs than for what it signals: that Silicon Valley-style venture entrepreneurship and rapid-iteration AI tooling are now considered relevant instruments for a problem historically confined to classified military channels.

Early life and career

Lamm grew up in Texas and studied finance and accounting at Baylor University, graduating in 2004. He started his first company, the corporate eLearning firm Simply Interactive, during his junior year; by the time he left in 2010 it had grown into one of the largest eLearning providers in the United States. That pattern—found a company, scale it, exit, repeat—became the throughline of Lamm's career. Over the following decade he founded or co-founded a sequence of ventures: Chaotic Moon Studios, a mobile and creative-technology shop acquired by Accenture in 2015; Team Chaos, a mobile gaming company sold to Zynga in 2016; and Conversable, a conversational-AI platform acquired by LivePerson in 2018. A 2020 CNBC profile on Lamm's fifth startup captured the pattern explicitly, describing him as a founder who repeatedly identifies an emerging technology wave, builds a company to ride it, and cashes out before the market matures—a habit that gave him both capital and a Rolodex of investors well before he pivoted to genetics.

In February 2018 Lamm founded Hypergiant Industries, an Austin-based enterprise AI company that built machine-learning systems for critical infrastructure, aerospace and defense clients. Hypergiant's customer list came to include the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Space Force, the Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the U.S. Army, the National Reconnaissance Office, Boeing, and Booz Allen Hamilton; the company was one of 29 firms named to a $950 million ceiling indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract with the Department of Defense, and it partnered with the Air Force on a planned 36-satellite constellation designed to relay real-time, machine-learning-processed data from orbit. Hypergiant also drew attention for the Eos Bioreactor, a refrigerator-sized, algae-based carbon-capture device the company claimed could sequester carbon up to 400 times more effectively than an equivalent stand of trees. Lamm eventually stepped back from day-to-day leadership at Hypergiant, moving to vice chairman as an outside enterprise-technology executive took over as CEO—part of the same build-and-hand-off pattern visible across his earlier startups. Hypergiant positioned Lamm as a credible operator in defense-adjacent AI years before UAP research became his focus, and it is plausible that this track record—translating advanced computation into government-relevant applications—later factored into his selection for the UAP council.

Colossal Biosciences and de-extinction

In 2021 Lamm co-founded Colossal Biosciences with Harvard geneticist George Church, a pioneer of synthetic biology and genome engineering. Colossal's stated mission is de-extinction: using ancient DNA recovery, CRISPR gene-editing, and reproductive technology to restore extinct species or functional proxies of them. Its publicized targets include the woolly mammoth, the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), the dodo, the moa, and the bluebuck antelope. For the mammoth, Colossal's scientists are editing mammoth genes recovered from frozen tundra remains into Asian elephant cells to produce hybrid embryos, with a stated goal of birthing the first calves by 2028. Its thylacine program is run jointly with the University of Melbourne's Thylacine Integrated Genomic Restoration Research Lab, led by biologist Andrew Pask; in August 2026 that partnership was expanded into a new entity, Colossal Australia, aimed at eventually reintroducing engineered thylacines to Tasmania. The company has attracted an unusually broad investor base spanning venture capital and celebrity money—Paris Hilton, Tom Brady, Peter Jackson, Chris Hemsworth, and deep-ocean explorer Victor Vescovo among them—and by March 2026 had raised more than $615 million at a valuation exceeding $10 billion, extraordinary figures for a pre-commercial biotechnology company. Lamm has proven adept at pairing serious genomics with mainstream media reach, producing glossy coverage (including a Hollywood Reporter feature on his Hollywood ties) that keeps Colossal in public view well beyond the trade press a typical biotech startup would attract.

The dire wolf controversy

Colossal's highest-profile claim, and the one most instructive for evaluating Lamm's credibility, arrived in April 2025, when the company unveiled three gray wolf pups—named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi—engineered with roughly twenty gene edits intended to produce dire-wolf-like traits such as larger size and pale, thick fur. Colossal and Lamm publicly described the animals as de-extinct dire wolves, a claim amplified across national media.

The scientific response was sharply critical. University of Maine paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill said flatly that Colossal had not revived dire wolves, and other biologists, including a University at Buffalo geneticist quoted in coverage of the episode, argued that editing a handful of genes into a living gray wolf produces, at best, a superficial visual resemblance—an animal that cannot fill the ecological role the extinct dire wolf once occupied. Science magazine's own analysis, headlined "Is the dire wolf back from the dead? Not exactly," walked through the genetic distance between the pups and the true extinct species. Notably, Colossal's own chief scientist, Beth Shapiro, acknowledged in May 2025 that the animals are "gray wolves with 20 edits," conceding that it is not possible to recreate an organism genetically identical to one that no longer exists. When pressed on the criticism, Lamm dismissed the objection to his terminology as "a stupid argument," maintaining that Colossal had met a legitimate functional and phenotypic bar for de-extinction even if the genome was not a literal restoration.

The episode is useful context for readers of a UFO/UAP-focused reference: it shows a pattern, also visible in his later UAP-council role, of Lamm operating at the boundary between genuine, well-funded scientific work and aggressive, media-forward claims that outrun what the underlying science strictly supports. Serious geneticists remain involved in Colossal's work, and the company's gene-editing technology is real and has attracted legitimate scientific interest—but the marketing consistently pushes past the more cautious language its own scientists use.

Astromech and later AI ventures

In 2026 Lamm took the CEO role at Astromech, an AI-powered forecasting engine aimed at predicting biological outcomes, building on techniques developed inside Colossal's genomics pipeline. The company closed a $10.5 million funding round while still largely in stealth mode and was reported to carry a valuation near $2 billion—a striking figure for an early-stage forecasting startup, and one more indication of how readily investors have extended Lamm the kind of speculative capital usually reserved for proven category leaders. The Astromech thesis—that machine-learning models trained on large biological datasets can forecast outcomes (disease progression, genetic trait expression, ecosystem response) faster and more cheaply than traditional lab-bound experimentation—is essentially the same pitch Lamm has carried across Hypergiant, Colossal, and now the UAP council: that pattern-recognition software, not additional headcount or years of bench work, is the bottleneck-breaking input for hard scientific problems. Investors have consistently rewarded that pitch with valuations well ahead of product maturity, a dynamic that mirrors the earlier dire wolf episode, where market and media enthusiasm again outran the underlying science.

Reputation among peers and investors

Within the startup world, Lamm is frequently described as an unusually effective storyteller and fundraiser—a founder who can translate dense technical work into a narrative compelling enough to draw in celebrity investors, mainstream press, and now federal appointments, even when domain specialists raise objections about the underlying claims. Profiles in outlets such as Inverse and CEOWORLD have cast him as a "repeat founder" whose comparative advantage lies less in any single technical specialty than in company-building itself: assembling capital, recruiting credentialed scientists as figureheads and technical leads, and generating sustained media attention. That skill set explains both his commercial success and the recurring pattern of scientific pushback—Beth Shapiro's dire wolf caveat and Jacquelyn Gill's public rebuke among the clearest examples—that has followed several of his ventures.

UAP Science Advisory Council appointment

In June 2026 the Trump administration, working through the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the FBI, established a new UAP Science Advisory Council to bring outside scientific expertise to bear on the government's UAP data. The council was placed under the leadership of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, known for his Galileo Project search for extraterrestrial technosignatures and for his controversial interpretation of the interstellar object ʻOumuamua. According to reporting in DefenseScoop and The Harvard Crimson, Loeb assembled a roster drawing heavily from his own Harvard orbit, mixed with outside figures meant to broaden the panel's disciplinary range—among them physicists, data scientists, at least one declared skeptic (Michael Shermer), and Lamm, whose seat was framed around his experience applying AI and large-scale data analysis to complex biological and forecasting problems.

No public statement from Lamm specifically addressing his appointment or his personal views on UAP has surfaced in mainstream coverage; his role appears to have been solicited for his technical and entrepreneurial track record rather than any prior public interest in the subject. The council's broader mandate, as described by Loeb in his own writing, is to help the government sort signal from noise in the expanding trove of UAP sensor and imagery data being released under the administration's PURSUE declassification initiative launched in May 2026, and Lamm's presence reflects an explicit bet that commercial-grade machine learning pipelines—the same kind Colossal and Astromech use to process genomic and biological data—can be repurposed to characterize anomalous radar, video, and sensor returns.

Significance and context

Lamm's appointment marks a visible break from how U.S. government UAP work has traditionally been staffed: almost entirely by military officers, intelligence analysts, and credentialed academic scientists operating inside classified or semi-classified structures. Placing a repeat startup founder—one whose most famous recent claim was disputed by his own chief scientist—on an official advisory body signals that the current administration views rapid-iteration, venture-backed AI development as a legitimate complement to, or even substitute for, slower government and academic research cycles. Whether that bet pays off in genuine analytical progress on the UAP question, or simply imports Silicon Valley's tendency toward overstated claims into a domain already prone to them, remains to be seen. For now, Lamm's UAP-council seat is best understood as an extension of his established public profile: a technologist skilled at attracting capital and headlines for frontier science, applying that same instinct to one of the highest-profile mysteries in contemporary government research.