About Peter Berg

Thanks for visiting.

I’m a statisician by training, but these days I am working on something new in agentic commerce. I am also a Venture Partner with Communitas Capital, an early-stage fund founded by the former CEOs of NYSE, Thomson Reuters and Instinet. 

Until recently, I was a Managing Partner at M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, leading a team focused on strategic investments and partnerships in applied AI for Fintech, Retail, Commerce and B2B software. 

Before joining Microsoft I led partnerships and strategy for Very Good Security (VGS), a global leader in payments tokenization powering commerce experiences for companies like McDonald’s, Starbucks, Robinhood, Brex and leading agentic payments startups. VGS has over 5 Billion payment credentials and vaults over 70% of all US cards. 

Prior to VGS, I started and ran Visa’s global investment group, Visa Ventures, building strategic partnerships and making investments in early-stage companies across the payments & fintech ecosystem. We also developed a number of pilots and proofs of concept, including Visa B2B Connect, the first ever blockchain-enabled commercial payments platform.

Investments included Stripe, Chain (now Interstellar), Marqeta, Klarna, LoopPay (which became Samsung Pay), and many more.

Prior to Visa, I co-founded October Three, a consulting and technology firm, where I worked on building the first SaaS platform to automate and scale tax-optimized retirement plans and benefits programs.

Before that, I built consumer products at Joby (makers of the award-winning Gorillapod), where I ran e-commerce, marketing, and a number of other things. I also took on several special projects, like helping to open our Geneva sales office, doing product management in China, and building Gorillacam, an award-winning iPhone photography app that got over 1 million downloads within 5 weeks of launch and was selected by Apple as a featured app. It ultimately garnered over 3 million downloads (before the company sadly sunset it long after my departure #missedopportunity).

Prior to Joby I was an actuary at a boutique consulting company, where I helped build the very first Internet-based product in the retirement/cash balance industry. This caught the eye of JP Morgan, which acquired us.

Before that, way back in the early days of the web, I helped build another cool Internet startup that not only brought me my first patent, but also survived the dot-com bust and continues to thrive today.

I have a BS in Mathematical and Computational Science and a MS in Statistics, both from Stanford University.

I’m always happy to advise startups, or just talk tech or product design. Feel free to contact me via email at peter [at] pberg.com, or via my contact page.

You can find even more of me on Twitter or LinkedIn.am

48 Comments