Every enduring company’s day zero is different, but some aspects are universal: There’s an exceptional person with early inklings of an idea, a whiteboard with scrawlings of what will eventually become v1 and a couple of forward-thinking early contributors who take the plunge.

BCV Labs is designed for teams like this. It’s an AI incubator and technical community in Palo Alto that helps exceptional founders find the serendipity that builds generational companies. It’s where founders do the unglamorous, hard work of building AI products that solve a real problem. It's where you go when you want to stop talking about AI, and start building.

We’ve worked with several exceptional AI founders over the last several years, like Andy at Clari, Bhavin at Moveworks, Rami at EvenUp, Jason at Poolside, and Brian at Unstructured. Company-building is messy, as many of us know from our careers pre-investing. Labs is the perfect place for founders, researchers, engineers and product people to do that messy work, to figure things out, and ultimately to build something great.

Of course, day zero is just the beginning. Our hope is to partner with entrepreneurs not just at day zero, but every day after.

We provide financing that fits each founders’ needs, from small pre-seeds to larger, priced seed rounds. We don’t prescribe any specific structure or amount, and look to you to guide us on what’s best for your company. Aside from inception funding, BCV Labs also provides founders access to space, talent, customers, compute credits and the global Bain Capital platform.

If you’re thinking about starting a company or finding fellow founders, tell us a bit about yourself.

Apply here

Our community

At the heart of every meaningful company is a community banding together to build, validate, and execute like there’s no tomorrow. And every great community has a meeting place where ideas flow.

We’re excited to take the wraps off of our brand new space in Palo Alto, where we host regular events, salons, demo days and debates. Our get-togethers are small by design, and curated to increase the quality of every conversation. Since its inception over the summer, friends in our community have found co-founders, founding employees, early customers and advisors via Labs events.

Many of the most promising ideas in AI are proposed in academia and commercialized in industry. Labs is a focal point for these two groups to connect and discover what’s possible.

BCV Labs’ working space is located in Palo Alto, less than a mile from Stanford.

Who we’re looking for

Rather than a cookie-cutter program, we’ve found that every company, and every founder, is different and deserves a bespoke experience. Over the last few months, we’ve incubated (and invested in) three talented teams building core LLM infrastructure, applications in security, and in analytics. We can’t share much about them now, but in each case, the founders brought different DNA, from serial entrepreneurship to fundamental research to big tech.

We’re looking for people from all backgrounds, from product to engineering to industry research to PhD programs and everything in between. While our team primarily invests in applications, infrastructure, commerce, and fintech, we’ve also worked with entrepreneurs in defense, climate, marketplaces, robotics and more.

Resources to fuel the journey from idea to IPO, and beyond

Compute

We offer compute credits with Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, OpenAI, Anthropic and NVIDIA, totaling around $1 million. In many cases, the Bain platform has proven to be an accelerant in securing in-demand compute clusters.

Space

All entrepreneurs working with BCV Labs have access to our incubation space in Palo Alto, where they can build, connect with other founders, researchers and engineers, as well as meet customers.

Events

We run monthly events in Palo Alto and San Francisco with small, curated groups to connect like-minded people to each other and have targeted conversations. Our founders have found co-founders, early employees, and customers at these gatherings.

Fellows

We build annual cohorts of a dozen rising stars in AI who are nominated by their peers as exhibiting high potential. Our current batch of fellows hails from OpenAI, Anthropic, FAIR, MosaicML and more, while others are starting their own companies.

Customers

The feedback and usage patterns uncovered by the first set of design partners can be transformational for young companies. Founders incubating at BCV Labs get access to the global Bain Capital network of CTOs, engineering leaders and other technology buyers, our AI Advisory Board of senior product and engineering leaders in AI, and executive briefings across forward-thinking buyers in industry to get high quality, relevant feedback on their ideas.

Talent

Our talent team has built some of the valley’s most iconic EPD organizations like Netflix, Airbnb and Dropbox. We help BCV Labs founders find their co-conspirators, from founding team members to early engineers and beyond.

We’d love to hear from you

If you're thinking about solving hard problems with AI or joining our community, or just have a question about BCV Labs, drop us a line at bcvlabs@baincapital.com.