Rak Garg

Rak Garg focuses on infrastructure software, cybersecurity and AI incubations, supporting technical founders creating the future of intelligent computing.

Partner

Bay Area

About Rak

Background

I was born in a small suburb of New Delhi. My father began his career there as a support engineer at Digital, which created the world’s first firewall. His fascination with the burgeoning internet security business carried my family to Sunnyvale, CA, when it was still the land of cherry orchards.

I was fortune to grow up coding. I spent nights and weekends experimenting with various Linux distros, building iPhone apps and trying to revive CPUs I had accidentally fried with prodigious overclocking. I spent undergrad attending hackathons, building one failed app after another and getting deeper in networks, cryptography and machine learning.

I returned to the Valley to build and eventually lead enterprise products at Atlassian, a BCV company. In some ways, BCV guided my career before I even knew it. Product management ingrained in me that a special team can move mountains. I think the same applies to venture.

Looking for:

Founders with a balance of conviction and curiosity.

Starting a company is hard. Entrepreneurship and investing force you to envision the world as it could be, not how it is or has been. I like working with founders who are convicted in their belief of the future while being reflective about their blind spots.

At UCLA, I researched ML techniques to help oncologists make earlier cancer diagnoses. ML has since transitioned from theoretical to prevalent, especially in textual modalities. I’m interested in novel architectures that bring AI to every surface and modality, the data and training stack powering LLMs, and the next generation of AI apps that reimagine how work is done.

Security inflected the arc of my story. It’s what brought me here, literally. AI will continue to exacerbate phishing, while agentic systems prove vulnerable to malicious intent and hijacking. I’m interested in working with founders leveraging AI to secure existing vulnerabilities in new ways, as well as founders protecting new vulnerabilities introduced by AI.

I have a special affinity for unleashing the potential of technical people. If you’re a strong engineer, researcher or scientist and can’t stop thinking about solving a problem, I want to meet you. Drop me a line at rgarg@baincapital.com, and I’d be delighted to tell you more about our incubation space and technical community, BCV Labs.