Astromech, the startup building AI models that predict biological change, has raised $20 million at a $3.8 billion valuation. Biotech investor Bob Nelsen led the round, joined by Peak 6, NeoGenesis Capital, Builders VC and CAZ Investments, bringing total funding to $60 million.
Ben Lamm and geneticist George Church founded Astromech to model biology the way meteorologists model weather. The system ingests genomic, evolutionary and functional data to anticipate bottlenecks, drug resistance and how species react to environmental change. It grew out of Colossal Biosciences, the de-extinction outfit, and leans on 3.8 billion years of evolutionary history as a core training input.
Its model architecture blends deep learning across species with a second engine that reverse-engineers biological systems through history before projecting them forward. Church says the focus on ancestral regulatory states, not just proteins, gives the models their explanatory power: most variation that matters for complex traits is regulatory rather than coding.
Longevity is the proving ground. Astromech has mapped 46 longevity-associated genes across a time-calibrated tree of life, studying how cancer resistance evolved in Asian elephants and how bowhead whales live past 200 years. Lamm likens the approach to weather forecasting: complex systems that humanity can predict with the right technology and datasets.
The funding expands research teams and comparative genomics infrastructure, with pilot projects planned in health and biosecurity.
