Year One

0

companies in our portfolio

50 %

funded at
formation-stage

0 %

female founded or
co-founded

50 %

university spinouts

$ 0 M

Follow-on
Capital Raised

$ 0 M

median seed
round size

Featured

Matterworks raised a $6M seed round in December 2020.

Investors include

Pillar, OMX Ventures, Wing, Emily Leproust, iGlobe Partners, Wavemaker 360 Health

Featured

New Equilibrium Bio raised a $10M seed round in March 2021.

Investors Inlcude

Pillar, RA Capital

In February 2020, founders and executives from Ginkgo Bioworks, Twist Bioscience, Beyond Meat, Insitro, and many others came together to fuel the launch of the next generation.

We had no idea that a pandemic would unravel across the globe.

One year later, we were happy to learn that the world was hungry for our new approach to funding formation-stage startups at the intersection of biology and engineering. 

We’ve partnered with 11 companies since launching, and over 800 people attended our first virtual summit, The Dish. Moreover, we’ve helped 1,000+ PhD students and postdocs get started on their founder journeys, through 25+ university events, a network of 200+ faculty labs, and our free virtual program, Frequency.

While we couldn’t have expected how 2020 would unfold, in hindsight, it feels like we launched at just the right time. We can’t wait to see you in person once the world opens up again!

“Founding a company and start-up capital are both commodities. Petri brings something different in providing capital with access to experienced business leaders who have proven success in building a company in the same industry.”

Emily Leproust, Co-Founder & CEO, Twist Bioscience
& Petri Co-founder

Portfolio

Eleven founders joined us during the first year of our program, leading companies that span drug discovery, therapeutics, tools, food and agriculture, biomaterials, and more.

Developing sustainable lab-grown cotton from cells on an industrial scale.

Founders
Luciano Bueno
& Dr. Paula Elbl

Accelerating discovery and engineering through faster metabolomic screening.

Founder
Mimoun Cadosch
Delmar

Expanding structure-based drug discovery to shape-shifting targets.

Founders
Dr. Virginia Burger
& Prof. Peter Tompa

Bio-fabricated materials for the fashion industry.

Founders
Jen Keane &
Dr. Ben Reeve

Measuring soil carbon accurately, instantly, and affordably.

Founders
Chris Tolles
& Kevin Meissner

Novel sensors for wound drainage monitoring + predictive tools for better patient outcomes.

Founder
Nikin Tharan

A protein engineering company still in stealth.

Founders
Prof. George Church
& Church Lab students

Broad platform to modulate any microbiome to achieve predictable stability in the engineered microbiomes.

Founders
Dr. Michael Koeris
& Prof. Tim Lu

Stealth startup developing technology to align patients & their physicians as strong partners and share in decision making.

Founder
Stealth

Founder Profiles

We observed radical perseverance and nimble adaptability from our first group of founders, who pivoted to create lab space out of shipping containers, built their teams entirely remotely, signed their first customers, and raised capital — through Zoom.

Virginia Burger

Luciano Bueno

Mimoun Cadosch Delmar

“If you want to start a company at the intersection of biology and engineering, partnering with Petri is the best way to make that happen.”

Alec Nielsen, Founder, Asimov 
& Petri Co-founder

Area of focus

Sustainability Solutions

Over the last few centuries, we’ve built a global economy that is inextricably reliant on fossil fuels. As a result, there’s no denying it — we’re warming Planet Earth. Beyond climate change, we’re faced with substantial sustainability challenges, including pollution, biodiversity loss, and deforestation, among others.

At Petri, we believe that biology will be increasingly leveraged to address these problems. Within the umbrella of sustainability, this year we invested in founders building companies focused on food, agriculture, biomaterials, and carbon removal.

GALY

What they do

Grow cotton in a lab from plant cell culture.

Impact

Significantly smaller emissions and resource footprint than conventional cotton.

Modern Synthesis

What they do

Grow clothing materials from bacterial cellulose.

Impact

Aim of replacing leather, an incredibly resource-intensive and polluting material.

Yard Stick

What they do

Measure soil carbon accurately and instantly.

Impact
Facilitates the development of global soil carbon offset markets.

Stealth

What they do

Engineer proteins.

Impact

Numerous applications in renewable chemicals and materials.

“Petri has introduced me to some of the best emerging talent that I've ever met, founders who are really smart and work on problems of great importance.”

Stan Lapidus, Chairman & CEO, Exact Sciences
& Petri Co-founder

Area of focus

Engineering in Health

How did the world move from a novel virus to a highly effective vaccine already distributed to millions of people in just a few months?

At every level, this success emphatically demonstrates biology’s emergence as a field of engineering: the genomics to rapidly sequence and analyze the SARS-CoV-2 genome; the biochemistry to copy and produce it in vitro; the mRNA technology to express the spike protein in the body and stimulate the human immune system; and the microfluidics to produce lipid nanoparticles for delivery. 

The same engineering mindset and sense of urgency can unlock progress on a host of current and emerging needs across human health.

The Matterworks team at the Pillar VC office.

Matterworks

What they do
Building tools to shine light on the metabolome, illuminating new territory of biological function for applications in drug discovery and metabolic engineering.

New Equilibrium

What they do

New Equilibrium Bio is creating new methods to model undruggable shape-shifting proteins to be the first to discover their druggable conformations.

“Working with Petri and its portfolio companies has been one of the most rewarding activities I have had.”

Jean Paul Mangeolle, Danaher, Sciex, Phenomenex
& Petri Co-founder

The Dish:
A Celebration of Bio + Engineering

On September 16th, 2020, we hosted our first virtual summit: “The Dish: A celebration of bio + engineering.” 

Over 800 members of the global bio community joined to listen to leaders including George Church, Daphne Koller and Stan Lapidus share insights about NexGen Food + Ag, Innovations in Therapeutics, Unexplored Topics in COVID, New Tools for Biotech and more.

All of the talks can be found here.

50 +

Over 800 members of the global bio community attended The Dish.

Over 350 PhD students, faculty, postdocs, and future founders joined us for our virtual startup school.

Apply for our next cohort

We launched our women’s founder network, The Wave, gathering founders and allies supporting women building in Bio.

Learn more

We’re one year in, but we’re just getting started!

We’d love to connect if you’re thinking about building or investing in companies at the intersection of biology and technology.

Through Petri, I was introduced to so many experienced founders who shared their time to provide targeted advice. Petri's provided amazing support in building our company.”

Virginia Burger Co-founder & CEO of New Equilibrium Biosciences

Virginia Burger

About Virginia

Virginia Burger grew up in Connecticut and got into chemistry through her grandfather. “My grandpa was a chemist, and he was really into computers.” Virginia remembers that, when she was little, he would come over with kids programming books and taught her how to code — and she loved it.

Virginia was drawn to biology and math in school and did her master’s thesis on protein folding. “I’m a mathematician. And I always wanted to be doing something with biology…Then one day, somebody gave a seminar on protein folding…and the whole thing just clicked.” Virginia completed her PhD in computational biology and got really interested in intrinsically disordered proteins, which is the core focus of New Equilibrium Biosciences.

While in a postdoc position at MIT, Virginia was looking for academic positions but wasn’t getting a sense of excitement. Virginia attended a startup networking session at Sloan and remembers that as her turning point: “Everybody was buzzing.” Virginia engrossed herself in entrepreneurship resources at MIT and then worked at XtalPi for two years to gain experience in an early-stage biotech company, before launching New Equilibrium Biosciences.

About New Equilibrium Biosciences

New Equilibrium is designing new therapeutics that target intrinsically disordered proteins, which is a class of underlying proteins that are involved in all kinds of cancers and neurodegenerative disorders, as well as many other diseases. They’ve never been able to be targeted before because of the challenges of juggling proteins that don’t have a fixed structure. “We’re pioneering computational and experimental approaches that let us actually see the different conformations with these protein samples and design drugs to selectively and specifically target them,” shares Virginia. “We’re taking advantage of the latest computational hardware to accelerate our algorithms, because there’s always been two problems, accuracy and coverage, and we’re hitting both with more accurate algorithms that are also faster, thanks to modern-day hardware and modern-day software. New Equilibrium wants to bring drugs to patients with high unmet need.”

outcome

New Equilibrium raised a $10M seed from RA Capital

Proudest Moment

“It's the most exciting to me when we find new team members who share our mission.w”

I'm very thankful. I would never have imagined that I would be here today. I came from a very unlikely background, but here I am, changing the world for the better.”

Luciano Bueno, Co-founder & CEO of GALY

Luciano Bueno

About Luciano

Luciano Bueno grew up in São Paulo, Brazil and started his entrepreneurship journey when he was 16 years old. Still a teenager, he understood that to achieve something, he needed to work hard. Because he was passionate about fashion, he started selling t-shirts door-to-door. At the university, he studied business, and then worked at Deloitte and in venture capital, before launching his first company in the textile industry.

Luciano claims that his first startup was “a fantastic failure.” It was his failure showed him his true mission. Luciano realized that it was not exactly the textiles/fashion he was passionate about, but the process, the hands, the people, the lives and the entire chain that survive behind that industry. Just like his hands and feet, which walked and knocked from door-to-door.

Reborn and renewed, Luciano looked for his old friend Paula Elbl. “We started to dig in a little bit more into our failures, our dreams and our expertises, through this fantastic chemistry, that GALY was born.”

About GALY

“At GALY, we are in the business of saving lives and the environment by producing cotton directly from cells,” explains Luciano. “We believe we found a new way of doing things; at scale we are able to grow the cotton 10 times faster, using 80% less resources, having the same quality or even better than what you find in the field,” all without the social issues that are common in cotton supply chains.

Luciano and GALY want to shift traditional agriculture to cellular agriculture. “I want every person on the planet to be able to produce almost anything that is made from plants without all the demanding resources and we won’t stop until we get there.”

He continues to explain… “Few people know the history of Brazil and the history of its people. I am the son of immigrants, and in our history, almost all have worked for cotton and cacao industries and farms. I have no doubt that my desire to change the lives of people who (still) work under these conditions also comes from my origin” explains Luciano.

Proudest Moment

Luciano’s proudest moment to date has been earning first place in the Global Change Awards from the H&M Foundation. “The recognition of our mission by the fashion industry today is our greatest achievement. This proves that one of the industries that pollutes the most in the world can also be the first one that wants to change this game.” He’s also incredibly pleased with his team’s perseverance and the engagement during COVID. At one point during the pandemic, the team turned a trucking container into a lab to keep making progress.

We wouldn't be where we are without Petri...Hiring good people is very difficult and Petri was instrumental; everyone in my current team was a Petri introduction…”

Mimoun Cadosch Delmar, Founder & CEO of Matterworks

Mimoun Cadosch Delmar

About Mimoun

Mimoun Cadosch Delmar grew up in Bogota, Colombia as the eldest son of immigrants. When Mimoun’s dad was thirteen, he started working to help pay his family’s bills and eventually started his own textile company. Mimoun remembers how his father used to pull him out of school for weeks to take him on business trips. He used to sit in all the meetings, go to all of the trade shows, and visit all the booths with his dad. “It made me realize this is what I want to do. I want to build a company. I want to innovate.”

In school, Mimoun studied math and computer science. At some point, Mimoun realized that “science is upstream of everything — our ability to grow the economic pie as a society…and I wanted to create a company to advance the rate of scientific progress.” Although a computer scientist by training, Mimoun was inspired by George Church’s book Regenesis to explore synthetic biology to program life instead of computers.

Mimoun chose to work at the Broad Institute in order to immerse himself in the center of the biotechnology field. “I always thought the way science worked was [by asking] ‘what scientific question can we ask — and how do we build the tools to answer it?’ [But] the way it really worked was, ‘What tools do we have, and what scientific questions do they allow us to ask?’ I realized that tools really drive science.”

About Matterworks

Mimoun started looking for areas where the tools are missing — where there are gaps, limitations, or constraints because the tools aren’t there quite yet. After over 200 interviews, some patterns started to emerge in the area of metabolomics. These conversations drove Mimoun to launch Matterworks.

Matterworks aims to drive adoption of metabolomics as part of the biotech tool stack, by making metabolomics technology that is much faster, broader and more cost effective than it is today. Metabolomics helps us understand how an organism makes use of the resources available to it. This is incredibly important in biotechnology, enabling us to diagnose, treat, and cure diseases — and to engineer organisms. “Our ability to understand, visualize, and characterize these metabolic processes in high resolution gives us a deeper insight into the biology that’s happening. And that is missing from a lot of the life sciences today.”

outcome

Matterworks raised a $6M seed from OMX Ventures, Wing, Emily Leproust, and more.

Proudest Moment

“I was very proud of the first set of the first proof of concept experiments that we ran… It was March 2020 and the peak of the pandemic. We drove to Amherst, and it was a ghost town. We ran these experiments…and then would code 12 hours in the hotel, and then go back to the lab. It was exhausting, but, eventually we learned some really important things about the science we’re trying to do. We were very proud of that.”

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