BAG Ventures closes $11.3M fund to back early-stage AI startups focused on enterprise results
Already invested in 10 startups over two years, the firm writes $100,000-$500,000 checks and will deploy the rest over the next two years. Its 150+ limited partners include Google and operators from Nvidia, Amazon and Snowflake.
BAG Ventures, a venture firm founded by two Google alumni, announced in September 2026 the close of an $11.3 million debut fund aimed at early-stage AI startups that can demonstrate clear value to enterprise customers.
The firm was co-founded by Bontia Stewart, a former Google vice president who spent 17 years at the company and served on the board of Gradient Ventures, and Jackson Georges Jr., a former partner at CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund. The two met at Google and later co-led BAG Collective, an angel syndicate with more than 450 members. They were also part of the inaugural cohort of the Black Venture Institute at Berkeley.
BAG Ventures has already deployed capital into 10 companies over roughly two years, including software company SXD, AI travel agent BizTrip, and agentic reasoning platform Nomadic. Check sizes range from $100,000 to $500,000, with the remainder of the fund expected to be deployed over the next two years. The firm targets startups in AI infrastructure, compute, edge AI, security, governance, and vertical SaaS. Its more than 150 limited partners include Google and operators from Nvidia, Amazon, and Snowflake.
Georges said the fund was launched to bridge a gap between AI founders and the enterprise operators they want to sell to. “Founders needed inside access to the organizations they wanted to sell into, and we knew so many high-level operators who wanted to support early founders but didn’t know how,” he said.
The firm’s investment thesis centers on a shift in how enterprises purchase AI. Georges said the “experimental sandbox” phase is ending, with companies now focused on unit economics and paying for deterministic outcomes rather than open-ended tools. “If a startup is just a thin wrapper around a frontier model API, they’re going to get wiped out,” he said, adding that BAG Ventures looks for teams building products that integrate deeply into legacy workflows and capture proprietary data.
The firm is also targeting startups in regulated industries and those building identity and access management tools for AI agents, which Georges described as “a massive and very lucrative gap.”