Astromech raised $20mn at $3.8bn to forecast how biology breaks

Astromech raised $20 million in a round led by Bob Nelsen, bringing total funding to $60 million and valuing the Dallas startup at $3.8 billion. Founded by Ben Lamm and George Church, the company uses AI-driven ancestral regulatory state reconstruction to predict genomic and population trajectories, having mapped 46 longevity-related genes across a time-calibrated tree of life and demonstrated a 100-fold speed improvement over traditional maximum-likelihood methods.