Peter Stern has spent the past three decades building and scaling companies across a wide range of industries—from financial services and social media to deep tech. His work has consistently centered on bringing game-changing products to market, often coupled with innovative business models or regulatory shifts that redefine entire categories.

Most recently, Peter served as CEO of Voyant Photonics, a high-tech startup making reliable machine perception affordable for automotive, robotics, and defense applications. Leveraging advances in silicon photonics, Voyant enables an order of magnitude reduction in the the price of sophisticated sensing systems. Under Peter’s leadership, the company grew from a lab concept to commercial prototypes, secured multiple funding rounds, and achieved seven-figure revenue.

Earlier in his career, Peter co-founded Datek Online in 1996, which revolutionized the retail brokerage industry by offering real-time, low-cost executions that competitors couldn’t match. By 1997, Datek was the fourth-largest online stock brokerage in the U.S. Peter served as CTO, Director, and President through its multi-billion-dollar merger in 2003 to create the second-largest online brokerage firm in the industry.

Peter went on to found Zenbe, an award-winning web and mobile messaging platform that served nearly a million users before being acquired by Facebook in 2010.

As the first CEO of Bitly, Peter transformed the company from a consumer URL shortener into a B2B analytics platform. In just two years he tripled the size of the team, raised a Series B round, and increased revenue by 10x.

Prior to creating Datek Online, Peter spent six years designing and field-testing military R&D systems involving LiDAR, helicopters, and advanced electro-optical systems.

Peter has been a venture partner at multiple VC firms and is also an active early-stage investor and advisor. He co-founded and ran the Open Field Entrepreneur Fund at Carnegie Mellon University to support young technology companies and continues to serve on the board of CMU’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship.

When he’s not working with founders or exploring new technologies, Peter can often be found tinkering with code or hardware, experimenting in the kitchen, or disappearing off-grid into the outdoors.