Petri

Tony Kulesa serves as the primary operating principal and leads investment decisions alongside co-founders Jamie Goldstein and Russ Wilcox. The three collectively manage the firm's pipeline and portfolio support, with Kulesa acting as the main interface for founders in the program.

Petri sources through its own community-building programs — Frequency Bio, virtual summits, and the Petri Podcast — which act as top-of-funnel engines attracting bioengineering PhDs, postdocs, and early-career scientists. The firm's connection to Pillar VC and Boston's university ecosystem provides additional proprietary access to talent before they formally enter venture markets.

Petri operates as a hybrid: a pre-seed venture firm with a studio-like support layer. Unlike traditional biotech VCs that invest and observe, Petri embeds founders in a structured program offering mentorship, customer introductions, talent recruiting, and intellectual property guidance alongside capital. This makes it functionally closer to a company builder than a conventional fund.

Petri only makes direct pre-seed investments in newly forming biotech companies. There is no evidence of any fund-of-funds activity or investment in external venture vehicles.

Petri exclusively targets pre-seed companies. The firm works with founders at the earliest stage — often before incorporation — to develop scientific ideas into fundable companies, covering the gap between academic research and institutional seed rounds.

Petri was co-founded and is funded by Pillar VC, a Boston-based venture firm whose partners include the CEOs of Exact Sciences, Ginkgo Bioworks, and Iora Health. Petri draws on Pillar's operator network and resources but operates as a distinct entity focused exclusively on pre-seed bioengineering.

Petri has not publicly disclosed a co-investment policy. Given its pre-seed focus and studio-like model, portfolio companies typically raise subsequent rounds from external biotech and deep-tech VCs, but no formal co-investment program has been documented.