Google Alumni Close $11.3M BAG Ventures Fund for Enterprise AI Startups

BAG Ventures, founded by former Google vice president Bontia Stewart and former CapitalG partner Jackson Georges Jr., closed an $11.3 million fund to back early-stage AI startups, betting enterprises will pay only for products with proven ROI as the AI experimentation phase ends. The firm has backed 10 companies, including SXD, BizTrip and Nomadic, with check sizes of $100,000 to $500,000. It targets AI infrastructure, compute, edge AI, security, governance and vertical SaaS, and plans to deploy the remaining capital over two years. Limited partners include Google and operators from Nvidia, Amazon and Snowflake. Georges said enterprises are shifting from open-ended chatbots to deterministic solutions embedded in legacy workflows. He warned that startups acting as "thin wrappers" around frontier model APIs will be displaced, favoring teams that own the intent layer, capture proprietary data and secure customer lock-in.