BAG Ventures has closed its inaugural $11.3 million fund to back early-stage AI startups building infrastructure, security, governance, and vertical software for enterprise customers.
Founded by former Google executives Bonita Stewart and Jackson Georges Jr., the New York-based venture firm is targeting startups that can show a clear path to enterprise value, rather than experimental AI products without a defined business case.
The firm writes checks ranging from $100,000 to $500,000 and plans to deploy the remaining capital over the next two years. BAG Ventures has already invested in 10 companies across enterprise AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, vertical applications and agentic workflows, according to TechCrunch.
BAG Ventures is Funding AI Startups Delivering Measurable Enterprise ROI
Bonita Stewart, who previously spent time at Google, and Jackson Georges Jr. started BAG Ventures. The company focuses on early-stage AI companies that show clear business value right away, moving away from experimental models toward secure enterprise tools built for practical use.
Related Post: Black-Led VC Firm Base10 Partners Raises $850M Across Two Funds
Stewart brings eighteen years of experience as vice president of global partnerships and served as a Gradient board partner. Georges worked at Google in large customer sales and HR and was a partner at CapitalG, focusing on portfolio growth, according to a press release.
The founders and managing partners now have Google backing for BAG Ventures. It is a venture firm that invests in innovative pre-seed and seed-stage startups across AI infrastructure, compute, physical and edge AI, vertical SaaS, security and governance. According to TechCrunch, its checks range from $100,000 to $500,000.
“Winning in enterprise AI isn’t just about building superior technology; it’s about building for the humans on the other side of it. We back founders who understand that technology only delivers when it empowers the people it’s meant to serve,” Stewart commented, per the release.
So far, Fund I has made ten investments spanning enterprise AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, vertical applications, and agentic workflows, including Nomadic AI, SXD, Superface, BizTrip AI, Galvant, Kuddo Health, Papr.ai, Defendermate, Cactus Compute, which is part of YC S25, and Lanai.
The firm has also taken part in two SPV investments with Sophia Space and Cohere. BAG Ventures’ thesis centers on B2B software that helps AI systems produce results, trust, and scale with lasting economics, from pre-seed to seed. The approach rests on three pillars.
Related Post: Collide Capital Closes $95M Fund II for Early-Stage Startups
The first is scale, which covers AI data infrastructure, next-generation AI compute, and physical and edge AI as the base layers for enterprise AI. The second is secure, which covers AI-native security and agentic infrastructure and governance as the control layer for deploying and overseeing autonomous AI in the enterprise. The third is deliver, which covers vertical service as software, where startups provide complete outcomes in high-value industries.
The Next Steps for the Venture Firm
BAG Ventures’ investing thesis centers on a shift in enterprise buying behavior. Georges said the “experimental sandbox” phase is ending. “Enterprises are dialing in heavily on the unit economics right now,” he noted.
“They aren’t just paying for open-ended chatbots anymore; they are paying for deterministic solutions. The real value is coming from solutions that integrate deeply into legacy workflows and actually execute the work.” He pointed to tasks like automating code reviews and parsing legal documents as examples.
Georges is preparing for a future where companies no longer pay for SaaS by seat. “We’ll be buying completed jobs and outcomes driven by multi-agent workflows,” he said. He wants to support founders who build tools that sit deep inside enterprise processes and collect proprietary data that cannot be pulled from the open web.
He noted that as frontier labs release more of their own products, strong technology alone will not be enough to last, and “if a startup is just a thin wrapper around a frontier model API, they’re going to get wiped out.” That is why the firm seeks teams whose products are embedded in core workflows and hold data that is hard to replicate.
“We want companies that own the intent layer and have the customer lock-in to survive the next big model release.” The firm is also focused on startups that sell into highly regulated sectors where privacy and compliance demand more specialized solutions. “That means securing internal data flows, building acceptable-use guardrails, and deploying continuous automated red-teaming,” said Georges. “We’re already seeing this approach work well with our portfolio company Defendermate.”
Related Post: Gateway Capital Partners Reaches First Close of $25M Fund II to Back Midwest Startups
BAG Ventures believes that companies will need new ways to manage identity and access for non-human workers such as AI agents. “Startups that can build the next level of ‘zero trust’ architecture and orchestration rails specifically for agentic systems are going to fill a massive and very lucrative gap,” Georges said.
Main Image: Bonita Stewart and Jackson Georges Jr., founders of BAG Ventures. Credit: BAG Ventures
