BAG Ventures closes $11.3M fund for early-stage AI startups

BAG Ventures, a firm founded by two Google alumni, has closed an $11.3 million fund to back early-stage enterprise AI startups. The firm has already backed 10 companies, including SXD, BizTrip and Nomadic, with check sizes ranging from $100,000 to $500,000. The team hopes to invest the rest of the fund over the next two years.

BAG Ventures invests in areas including AI infrastructure, compute, physical and edge AI, security, governance and vertical SaaS. Its limited partners include operators from Google, Nvidia, Amazon and Snowflake, with more than 150 limited partners in total.

The firm was founded by Bontia Stewart and Jackson Georges Jr. Stewart spent 17 years at Google, including nearly a decade as a vice president, and served on the board of Gradient Ventures, Google's early-stage AI fund. Georges worked at GE Healthcare and at Google, and later became a partner at CapitalG, Alphabet's growth fund.

Stewart and Georges co-led the angel syndicate BAG Collective, which has more than 450 members. The pair were in the first cohort of the Black Venture Institute at Berkeley. BAG Ventures was launched to address the emerging AI divide between founders and operators.