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 leaves behind more trust than it consumes.
Nate Peterson 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.
AgentBI began as an attempt to make the field-operator layer more capable, visible, and financially sustainable. One product couldn't repair a system-wide capability gap. Nate kept seeing the same agri-infrastructure problems rebuilt as temporary projects, one organisation after another. The studio exists to turn those recurring failures into durable companies.
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 convert a grant-funded programme into an investable company — 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. Converting grant businesses into investable ones 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