Nate is a venture studio by Peterson & Gill LLC that turns grant-funded public sector delivery problems into investable software and service companies.
We start where normal venture capital cannot: inside foundation-funded, government-adjacent, field-tested delivery systems. We use philanthropic and programme capital to validate the problem, then build companies that can charge from deployment one, work across countries, and eventually attract strategic or growth capital.
The first company, AgentBI, is being deployed in Kenya to build the business intelligence layer for agricultural frontline workforces. A healthcare frontline enablement pipeline is now being developed under the same thesis.
AgentBI, our first company, was built for exactly this kind of problem: a distributed frontline workforce that no system can see. For Mass General, the question is whether similar frontline and data gaps exist in post-discharge follow-up, patient navigation, care coordination, or pharma-program delivery — the work that rides on staff, hand-offs, and caseloads no system tracks.
AgentBI began with the agents who carry a product the last mile: hired and paid on guesswork, with no way to see whether they perform. A Gates Foundation grant paid for the validation, and we built the software that runs the operations behind that workforce — who to recruit, how to pay them, and what each one needs to close the sale. It is in live testing in Kenya. Its first market is seed distribution, but the problem underneath — managing a distributed frontline workforce — shows up in health, finance, and logistics almost everywhere.
We'd like 30 minutes. The goal is narrow: to test whether any of these problem areas are real and important enough to justify grant-funded discovery — at no cost, and no commitment, to Mass General.
What we'd walk through together:
Discovery costs Mass General nothing in fees and commits you to nothing. We would shape the product with Mass General's inputs and clinical validation, while carrying the discovery and build effort — and the risk — ourselves. The point of the 30 minutes is simply to identify whether there is a real operational problem worth building toward.
Nate launches one fund every two years. Each fund is organised around a single public sector theme and produces one to two companies out of hundreds of ideas — every idea prototyped, researched, and tested with expert guidance before a company is launched. Viable ideas are spun out with founding teams and pre-seed capital, and the studio stays on as a co-founder, so companies share infrastructure, data, investors, and markets.
The capital stack matches the risk profile of each stage: philanthropic capital de-risks ideation and field validation, studio capital builds product-market fit, and private capital enters once unit economics are proven. Converting grant businesses into investable ones is the product, not a by-product. A consulting firm cannot do this; it has no equity stake. A pure VC fund cannot either, since this stage is too risky to enter alone.
Fund I is Frontline Enablement, and we are launching a health company under it now — sourcing ideas with potential founders such as Aman Siwach (ex-Global Director, Markets Team, Clinton Health Access Initiative). If a validated, scalable opportunity comes out of discovery, we would explore a structured spinout together, with terms worked out alongside your counsel — but nothing in the discovery phase commits you to that.
Nate is built by people who have spent too much time inside public systems to believe that "innovation" is usually the missing ingredient. The problem is more specific than that. Public-sector delivery is full of real demand, real budgets, serious institutions, and unsolved operating problems. What it usually lacks is product architecture. Good ideas become pilots. Pilots become reports. Reports become nothing a customer can buy, an investor can underwrite, or a team can scale. That is the gap we are building for.
Nathanial Peterson is a behavioural scientist and venture builder focused on the human operating layer between institutions and the people they are trying to reach: farmers, agents, patients, frontline workers, and small businesses. He is a Senior Scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity International & CIAT, co-leads CGIAR's Food Systems Accelerator, founded Burgeon Strategy, and was formerly VP Partnerships at the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics.
Nishita Gill is the founder of Treemouse, a behavioural research and design studio that spent a decade helping early-stage startups and public institutions connect with the people they serve — building pathways to adoption across 30+ engagements in government, global health, and fintech, for clients including Meta, WHO, BCG, Bajaj Finserv, and Omidyar Network. She built and now leads the digital product capacity for HIV, TB, and Hepatitis at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, was founding Head of Design at Fi.Money — India's first major neobank — and redesigned India's national identity infrastructure (Aadhaar) with the Government of India, a product now accessible to 1.35 billion people.
Together, we are not trying to consult on public-sector problems. We are trying to find the small number of those problems that can become companies.
We build as co-founders, not service providers. Our return is equity, not fees.
The work only makes sense if the company survives after the grant ends.
Public sector products were built to survive on grants.
We're building them to stand on their own.