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.
Nate launches one fund every two years. Each fund produces one to two companies out of hundreds of ideas: every idea is prototyped, researched, and tested with expert guidance before a company is launched. Each fund is organised around a single public sector theme. 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.
Fund I is Frontline Enablement. Its first company, AgentBI, shows how the model works. We found a frontline barrier: the agents who carry a product the last mile get hired and paid on guesswork, and no one can see whether they perform. A Gates Foundation grant paid for the validation. We built software to run the operations behind that workforce — deciding who to recruit, how to pay them, and what each one needs to close the sale. AgentBI is in live testing in Nairobi. Its first market is seed distribution, but the problem underneath it — managing a distributed frontline workforce — shows up in health, finance, and logistics almost everywhere. Private capital conversations are underway, and the company is built to move into other geographies and other frontline markets, well past where the grant began.
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. Our model gives investors a legible entry point at the de-risked stage.
We are launching a health company under the same fund, and we are sourcing ideas now, partnering with potential founders such as Aman Siwach (ex-Global Director, Markets Team, Clinton Health Access Initiative).
The problems we think are worth testing at Mass General are ones we already work on in other settings:
We may be guessing wrong. A 30-minute conversation is enough to find out.
The engagement costs Mass General nothing in fees. Discovery and validation are grant-funded, and Mass General contributes problem access and clinical validation. We build the product with you, or for you if that is easier. If a validated, scalable opportunity comes out of the work, we would then explore a structured spinout together, with terms worked out alongside your counsel. 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.