Peter Kolesár

Over the past 15 years, Peter has worked across the full innovation landscape: helping startups grow and raise capital, universities commercialize their research, corporates design and run innovation programs, and governments and cities build local innovation ecosystems.

Earlier he served as a trade and innovation diplomat at the Slovak embassies in Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C. There he helped Slovak companies expand abroad and built innovation ties with Israel and the US. In 2016, he took over leadership of Neulogy, a boutique innovation consultancy. He repositioned the business and led it to an acquisition by Civitta, the CEE advisory group, where he went on to scale the business as Partner.

Peter is also a Partner at Traun Ventures, a pre-seed fund backing exceptional founders from Slovakia and CEE, and co-leads Startup Awards Slovakia. He sits on the boards of Košice IT Valley and the School of Diplomacy. He lectures on innovation and entrepreneurship at universities including his alma mater, Masaryk University in Brno. He also studied at Central European University in Budapest and Bard College in New York.