Google alumni close $11.3M AI fund; Ascerta raises $18M to measure AI ROI

TechCrunch reported that BAG Ventures was founded by Bontia Stewart, a former Google vice president, and Jackson Georges Jr., a former CapitalG partner. The firm closed the fund after about two years of investing from it as it came together. It has already backed 10 companies, including the software company SXD, the AI travel agent BizTrip and the agentic reasoning platform Nomadic. It invests in AI infrastructure, compute, physical and edge AI, security, governance and vertical SaaS. Check sizes range from $100,000 to $500,000, and the team hopes to invest the rest of the fund over the next two years.

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. She is a limited partner in the Female Founders Fund and the Operator Collective. With Georges, she also 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. He later became a partner at CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund. He and Stewart were in the first cohort of the Black Venture Institute at Berkeley.

Georges said the pair launched BAG Ventures to address the emerging AI divide between founders and operators. “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. “We don’t just give founders capital; we give them direct warm introductions to potential customers and hands-on go-to-market advice.” The firm’s limited partners include Google as well as operators from Nvidia, Amazon and Snowflake, with more than 150 limited partners altogether at a wide range of companies.

Georges’s investing thesis rests on a shift in how enterprises buy AI. He said the experimental sandbox phase is ending. “Enterprises are dialing in heavily on the unit economics right now,” he said. “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.” Examples include automating code reviews and parsing legal documents. He said enterprises will no longer buy per-user seats for SaaS tools and instead will buy completed jobs and outcomes driven by multi-agent workflows.

BAG Ventures wants core technical teams that have worked together before, have a minimum viable product and at least one partner, and have a very clear path to monetization within 24 hours. Georges said that if a startup is just a thin wrapper around a frontier model API, it will get wiped out, and that the firm wants companies that own the intent layer and have customer lock-in to survive the next big model release. It is also looking at startups selling into highly regulated industries, where data privacy needs may require specialization. “That means securing internal data flows, building acceptable-use guardrails, and deploying continuous automated red-teaming,” he said. “We’re already seeing this approach work well with our portfolio company Defendremate.” Georges added that enterprises will need Identity and Access Management tools 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,” he said.

SiliconANGLE reported that Ascerta Inc. raised $18 million in a Series A round led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Hitachi Ventures, BGV and Wipro Ventures. The round brings Ascerta’s total funding to date to $22.9 million. The startup aims to help businesses maximize their return on investment in AI. Many companies can count token consumption and measure how many lines of AI-generated code they have produced, but few can answer which AI projects are creating value and making money, the report said.

Ascerta co-founder and Chief Executive David Tepper said traditional FinOps tools are not useful for understanding the real-world business outcomes achieved by an AI agent or coding assistant. According to Tepper, most businesses see meaningless vanity metrics, counting things like token consumption and agent runs. “They’re struggling to derive the real impact AI has on their business,” he said. “We built Ascerta to cut through the noise and give organizations the means to win in the AI-era with insights specific to their business, people and use cases.”

Ascerta provides guidance through a single, unified system that reveals how a company is using AI, what the AI is doing and whether those efforts are translating into real revenue or savings. Its platform can connect to enterprise-grade AI tools from Microsoft Corp., Anthropic PBC, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Salesforce Inc. Once connected, it tracks the economics of AI down to individual users, teams and applications. Tepper said it can unmask hidden fees, enterprise discounts and sub-token costs missed by other tools. “[We provide] purpose-built tools to prevent waste and aggressively optimize AI for value,” he said.

The platform has three components: Atlas measures AI adoption, the value it generates and its return on investment; Forge provides insights into how engineering teams are using coding agents and how they affect productivity; and Convoy helps companies understand how much computing resources they are using for AI so they can consolidate workloads and optimize where possible. Ascerta has helped companies including Atos SE and Wipro Ltd. improve their return on investment by an average of 47%, reduce AI agent launch times by 24% and cut wasted AI resource spending by 86%. Atos Group Chief AI Officer Florin Ratar said Ascerta’s platform has been instrumental in helping his company scale its Sovereign Agentic Studios initiative, providing visibility and control.

Ramana Khanna, managing director of Dell Technologies Capital, said he is backing Ascerta because it is building a system of record for AI value creation. “Most enterprises are moving beyond broad AI experimentation and focusing their investments on what delivers measurable business value,” he said. “Ascerta is giving leaders the visibility and rigor they need to understand what’s working, optimize spending and scale their most successful AI initiatives.”

Editor's Summary

BAG Ventures, founded by two former Google executives, closed an $11.3 million fund for early-stage AI startups, with an emphasis on enterprise products that can show measurable value. Ascerta raised $18 million in a Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital to help companies track and improve the business return on their AI investments. Both moves reflect a shift by enterprises from broad AI experimentation toward solutions with clearer ROI and deeper integration into workflows.