Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal Biosciences, told a live audience that he expects his company to deliver a mammal that has never been inside a mother's body. Within 24 months, he said, Colossal will birth mammals fully ex utero, meaning outside the uterus. Peter Diamandis, the founder of XPRIZE who was interviewing him, spelled out what that meant: from gestation through delivery. Lamm added that the animal would never have gone into a surrogate, the female animal that would normally carry a lab-created embryo to term.
Lamm gave the forecast in a conversation at Moonshots Live 2026, recorded on 25 September 2026 and released as an episode of the Moonshots with Peter Diamandis podcast on 30 September. He said he hoped it would come "sooner" but called 24 months "highly likely". The response from the stage was a string of "wow"s. Salim Ismail, one of the hosts, asked the audience for a show of hands on whether their minds were blown.
Colossal is a biotechnology company that uses genetic engineering and AI for species preservation and "de-extinction", its effort to recreate animals such as the woolly mammoth. To produce such animals, it has to grow embryos, and that is where artificial reproduction comes in.
From an artificial egg to an artificial womb
Diamandis led into the question through a result Colossal has already announced. "You've come up with the artificial egg," he said, "not the kind you eat but the kind that gives birth to an avian species." On 19 May 2026, the company announced that chicks had hatched from its fully artificial egg system. The system replaces the shell with a silicone-based membrane on a supporting lattice. This lets the embryo exchange gases at ordinary atmospheric oxygen levels, and its transparency lets researchers watch the embryo develop. Colossal's stated aim is to scale the design up for birds whose eggs are larger than any living surrogate could produce, particularly the extinct South Island giant moa.
A bird's egg, however, already develops outside the mother's body. A mammal embryo depends on a uterus and placenta throughout pregnancy, so Lamm's forecast is a larger step. Colossal's closest public result for mammals is older. In October 2024 it reported growing fat-tailed dunnart embryos, a small marsupial, from a fertilised single cell to beyond the halfway point of pregnancy in an artificial uterus device. Neither announcement describes a mammal carried to birth outside a womb. The 24-month figure is Lamm's forecast, not something the company has yet shown.
What about people?
Diamandis asked how far off it is until a woman in the audience could have a baby in an artificial womb. Lamm did not give a date. He said the answer from a technology perspective is very different from the answer once social acceptance, ethics and regulation are taken into account. Diamandis then narrowed the question to non-human mammals, and that is where Lamm gave his two-year estimate.
The next "iPhone moments"
Diamandis asked what Colossal's "iPhone moment" would be, whether a woolly mammoth walking onto a stage or something else. Lamm said the company has had some of those moments already and named the next inflection points in order. The first is showing the world another extinct species brought back through precision gene editing. Asked when, he said "coming soon". The second is "mammalian artificial development and gestation". The third is work Colossal has not yet made public, which he said was as interesting as its dire wolves. "If that surprised you and delighted you," he told the audience, the company has more. And if it "surprised and scared" them, he added, it has that too.
Raising an animal with no mother
Later, Diamandis read an audience question from someone named Teresa. How was Colossal handling the ethics of creating mammals outside the womb, given that a mammal has emotional needs, and creating it does not relieve its makers of responsibility for a living creature? Dave Blundin, founder of Link Ventures, put it more bluntly: if an animal is born ex utero, does it get a family to live with?
Lamm's answer started with scale. Mammoths and elephants are highly social animals, he said, so "we're not going to bring back a mammoth, we're bringing back herds of them." Asked how many mammoths he wants to bring back, he said "tens of thousands". When Diamandis joked about mammoths in Los Angeles, Lamm replied that they would have to be Columbian or pygmy mammoths.
He then described how the company is working on the social side. Lamm said Colossal has a foundation that makes its technologies free for conservation use, and that it has 75 global partners. One of those efforts is in Botswana with a group called Elephant Havens, which works with elephants that were born naturally but orphaned or abandoned. Elephant society is led by matriarchs, and orphans lose that structure. Lamm said Elephant Havens uses AI and other tools to work out how to build "synthetic herds" from these orphans: how to rear them, teach them to be elephants and get them to work together as a herd. The Colossal Foundation describes the partnership as research into orphaned elephants' social development and eventual reintroduction to the wild. It says an AI platform is meant to inform release strategies for herds without a strong adult presence.
Separately, Lamm said, Colossal is funding research that uses satellite imaging, drones and AI to follow elephant migration routes and corridors and to understand the social hierarchy of herds on the move. The foundation's page describes a project that combines drones and machine learning to study elephants' movement, behaviour and social relationships.
Lamm said the work serves two purposes. For elephants alive today, it could mean that orphans are no longer left alone and that entire herds can be returned to the wild. For Colossal's own plans, it is groundwork for Teresa's question. The same data, he said, tells the company how to rear animals born ex utero so that they "grow up in a social dynamic with the right hierarchy."