Two former Google executives have raised an $11.3 million fund to invest in early-stage artificial intelligence companies, betting that corporate buyers are moving past experimentation and will pay only for AI products that demonstrate clear results. The fund, BAG Ventures, was founded by Bonita Stewart, a former Google vice president, and Jackson Georges Jr., a former partner at CapitalG, Alphabet's growth fund. The firm spent roughly two years investing from the fund as it was being assembled and has already backed 10 companies.
The portfolio includes the software company SXD, the AI travel agent BizTrip and the agentic reasoning platform Nomadic. BAG Ventures targets startups working in AI infrastructure, compute, physical and edge AI, security, governance and vertical SaaS. Investment checks range from $100,000 to $500,000, and the team intends to deploy the remainder of the fund over the next two years.
Stewart worked at Google for 17 years, nearly a decade of that as a vice president, and served on the board of Gradient Ventures, Google's early-stage AI fund. She is a limited partner in the Female Founders Fund and the Operator Collective. With Georges, she previously co-led the angel syndicate BAG Collective, which has more than 450 members. Georges worked at GE Healthcare and at Google, where he met Stewart, before joining CapitalG. The two were in the first cohort of the Black Venture Institute at Berkeley.
Georges said the firm's advantage is access, describing an emerging divide between founders and operators. He said founders need connections inside the organizations they want to sell to, while many senior operators want to help early founders but lack a way to do so. BAG Ventures provides capital along with introductions to potential customers and hands-on go-to-market guidance, he said. The firm's limited partners include Google and operators from Nvidia, Amazon and Snowflake, among more than 150 total.
Georges said his investing thesis rests on a shift in how enterprises purchase AI. He said the experimental phase is ending, that enterprises are focused on unit economics, and that buyers are no longer paying for open-ended chatbots but for deterministic solutions that integrate into legacy workflows and execute work, such as automating code reviews and parsing legal documents. He added that he expects enterprises to eventually buy completed jobs and outcomes driven by multi-agent workflows rather than per-user seats.
BAG Ventures looks for core technical teams that have worked together previously, have a minimum viable product and at least one partner, and show a clear path to monetization within 24 months. Georges said startups that are thin wrappers around frontier model APIs will be wiped out, and that the firm seeks companies owning the intent layer with customer lock-in. The firm is also examining startups selling into highly regulated industries, where Georges said data privacy needs may require securing internal data flows, building acceptable-use guardrails and deploying continuous automated red-teaming, an approach he said is working with portfolio company Defendermate. He also said enterprises will need identity and access management tools for non-human workers such as AI agents, and that startups building zero trust architecture and orchestration rails for agentic systems will fill a lucrative gap.
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