We turn grant-funded public sector problems into investable software and service companies — country-first in design, multi-country in scale. Grants hedge the risk; investment powers the expansion.
People are often blamed for choices made inside systems that deny them the information and support to succeed. Nate builds companies that repair those systems — and leave them more trusted than before.
Nate came to African agriculture through financial inclusion. Work on credit and insurance kept hitting the same wall: unreliable farmer data, fragmented distribution, high service costs, low trust. Agriculture wasn't chosen off a market map — it's where the systems problem kept leading.
It got personal during a severe Kenyan drought, when he watched livestock die for lack of feed and water, then met the same fodder and maize-productivity constraints on his own sheep farm. The question that stuck: how do better, more climate-resilient inputs actually reach farmers at scale? Technology has no impact sitting in a research station or a warehouse.
A second, agriculture-only company is being sourced from the same fund — ideas generated and proto-tested under the theme.
Apply to be a co-founder or join the team prototyping companies →Roughly a third of the world still can't reliably get essential medicines, and the gap is widest across India and sub-Saharan Africa. The failures are in delivery, not discovery: nearly a quarter of medicines sampled in Africa are substandard or falsified, close to half the world lacks basic diagnostic imaging, and a health-worker shortfall heading toward ~10 million by 2030 leaves the last mile chronically thin.
Why now: the fixes finally have rails and evidence — India's digital-health mission has crossed a billion linked health records, decentralised community-based care is now proven in top-tier trials, and capital is returning to the sector. Grants can de-risk the validation years, investment enters once the model is proven.
Co-create a company with us — we're looking for essential problems worth solving at scale.
Reach out — hello@petersonandgill.com →Each Nate fund launches around a single public sector theme. Many ideas are generated under it; the promising ones are proto-tested into companies with co-founders, then seeded and spun out with a founding team. The studio stays a co-founder, so companies share infrastructure, data, investors, and markets — and don't start from zero.
Every company is designed for two funders from day one. Philanthropic capital absorbs the validation years — the zone where public sector pilots die. Private capital enters only past that point, buying proven demand: fee-generating from first deployment, multi-country from the start, exit-legible from the first contract. Grant-fundable today, investor-ready tomorrow.
A consulting firm can't build an investable company in a grant-funded space — it has no equity stake. A pure VC fund can't de-risk the early validation — it has no grant access. The studio sits at the intersection of both. Building investable companies from validated public-sector problems is the product, not a by-product.
Public sector products were built to survive on grants.
We're building them to stand on their own.
Working on a grant-fundable problem in the impact sector? Reach out — hello@petersonandgill.com