BAG Ventures Closes $11.3M Fund to Back Early-Stage AI Startups
BAG Ventures, founded by Bonita Stewart, a former Google vice president, and Jackson Georges Jr., a former CapitalG partner, has closed an $11.3 million fund to back early-stage AI startups, as the firm bets that enterprise AI is moving beyond experimentation toward products that can demonstrate measurable value to customers.
The fund was closed after approximately two years of investing while its capital was being assembled. BAG Ventures has already backed 10 companies, including software company SXD, AI travel agent BizTrip, and agentic reasoning platform Nomadic.
The firm invests in startups across AI infrastructure, compute, physical and edge AI, security, governance, and vertical SaaS. Its check sizes range from $100,000 to $500,000, with the team planning to deploy the remaining capital over the next two years.
Bonita Stewart spent 17 years at Google, including nearly a decade as a vice president. During her tenure, she also served on the board of Gradient Ventures, Google’s early-stage AI fund. She is a limited partner in Female Founders Fund and Operator Collective. Together with Georges, she also co-led the angel syndicate BAG Collective, which has more than 450 members.
Jackson Georges previously worked at GE Healthcare and Google, where he met Stewart, before becoming a partner at CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund. He and Stewart were also part of the first cohort of the Black Venture Institute at Berkeley.
The founders say their key advantage is access. BAG Ventures was launched to “address the emerging AI divide between founders and operators,” Georges said.
“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. As a result, “we don’t just give founders capital; we give them direct warm introductions to potential customers and hands-on [go-to-market] advice,” he continued.
The firm’s limited partners include Google, as well as operators from Nvidia, Amazon, and Snowflake, while BAG Ventures has more than 150 limited partners altogether across a wide range of companies.
