Daniel Taylor had received an email about a domain name. Bags.com was available, he explained in an April 2025 conversation. The asking price was $1.7 million. For a founder whose company helps small businesses think carefully about money, it was a pleasingly extravagant opening topic. The company was using securebags.com. The verb was doing useful work.
Securing the bag, in Taylor's world, involves a good deal more bookkeeping than the expression usually suggests. He is the co-founder and CEO of Bags, a New York business built around an awkward encounter: an owner has customers, ambition and a chance to expand, then someone asks for the financial statements. Suddenly, the business has to explain itself in another language.
Taylor came to that encounter with an unusual collection of experiences. He had played midfield at Brown, co-founded a football management business and helped build a startup that was acquired. His present preoccupation is less photogenic than any of those things. He wants an owner's records to make sense before an opportunity depends on them.
Before the balance sheet, the midfield
At Brown, Taylor wore number 19. He arrived from Greenwich, Connecticut, after attending Brunswick School, and concentrated in environmental studies. In 2013, he earned second-team All-Ivy recognition as a midfielder. His five assists put him level with the team's leading total; his three goals included a winner against Penn in the 105th minute. Someone had to keep working after an ordinary afternoon had become a rather long one.
By his senior season, he was a co-captain talking about preparation and communication. Asked about defending against strong attacking teams, he stressed the need for the backline to keep talking and track the opposing strikers. “We need a lot of communication,” he said. It is an ordinary sporting instruction, made memorable here by the distance it would travel.
Football remained a business interest. Taylor co-founded Only4Stars, established in 2015, and its team biography identifies him as president and a former professional player. The firm works across talent representation, match agency and club partnerships. His early working life already involved people whose performance was visible, but whose next opportunity depended on somebody arranging the connection.
An exit, then a call to an old friend
Taylor also co-founded AskTipster, a fashion technology and social data business. It participated in Stanford's StartX ecosystem and was acquired by Flowcode in 2019. That history gives his current work a particular tension: someone who had found a route through the startup system began asking what happened to owners outside its familiar circles.
In 2020, the earnout from that first startup coincided with the murder of George Floyd. Taylor described the period as a moment to consider his own access to capital as a Black entrepreneur. The question was concrete. Could those advantages be turned into something that helped other owners build wealth, hire people and strengthen their communities?
He reached out to William Hayden, his best friend from high school. Both came from entrepreneurial families. Hayden had been working in media and brand storytelling; Taylor wanted to build something with tangible impact. Their friendship preceded the company, which is useful context for a venture whose eventual subject would be trust, access and the practical business of getting help.
The early organization was called AMP. Its February 2021 public launch described an accelerator, a technology studio and a community for underrepresented entrepreneurs and creatives. Henry Taylor, Daniel's brother, led its Watt Program. The initial work included education, advisory support and introductions to financial supporters. It was a broader brief than the financial platform that followed, with information and useful connections already at its center.
- Second-team All-Ivy midfielder at Brown.
- AskTipster is acquired by Flowcode.
- The organization that becomes Bags begins.
- AMP becomes Bags.
- Bags adds a subscription service.
A name with a job to do
By 2022, AMP had become Bags. Taylor announced the change with unmistakable enthusiasm. The company's explanation connected the name to the businesses it hoped to serve: securing money to grow, provide jobs and establish wealth that could outlast the founder. The language was casual; the intended consequences were quite specific.
Ignacio Semerene joined Taylor and Hayden in the founding team. The company that emerged initially helped business owners discover lenders. Over time, the work widened. Finding a possible funding source could leave the owner facing a second problem: the financial information needed to qualify was incomplete, inconsistent or difficult to use.
The subscription service added in 2023 helped give that wider work a business model. By April 2024, Bags had provided financial and debt-landscape analysis to more than 4,000 diverse entrepreneurs, alongside coaching and funding matches. Its focus on referrals also grew after examining where customers came from. The company was learning about its own finances while asking clients to understand theirs.
The opportunity arrives. The books must be ready.
In a July 2024 conversation with Startup CPG, Taylor described a swimwear founder whose early sales were about $50,000 a year. She had purchase orders and kept selling out of stock, but did not know a $15,000 order could be financed. In his account, that additional inventory helped the business reach $200,000 in revenue. The missing piece was knowledge of an available route.
The same discussion accompanied a free, crowdsourced financing database that Bags sponsored with Startup CPG. It organized lending options by type and provider requirements. For a small brand, making the choices legible could be useful well before any application. A promising retail order still leaves questions about paying for inventory and supporting the launch.
Taylor's preferred order of operations was concise: “revenue first, debt second, equity third.” His explanation began with the owner's desired business and the immediate step toward it. He recalled once approaching a lender with a $50,000 business and asking for half a million dollars. He now argued for breaking the next step into a smaller, more realistic requirement.
“revenue first,
Daniel Taylor / July 2024
debt second,
equity third.”
By 2025, he was explaining Bags as a combination of financial management, access to capital and decisions about how to use it. The progression reveals an operator following a recurring customer problem deeper into the business. Once the loan conversation exposed the records, records became part of the job. Once money arrived, the repayments and spending decisions remained.
Understand the business.
Review the terms.
Support the owner.
Fast money has a calendar
Taylor's concern extends to what happens when financing arrives too easily. In January 2025, he described owners beginning on personal credit cards and finding that their deteriorating personal credit made a later business loan harder to obtain. An expedient beginning could narrow the next set of choices.
He also discussed merchant cash advances, where repayments can be taken from daily sales. His concern was the cumulative effect when an owner added advances to cover earlier obligations. Sales could be coming in while successive repayments consumed money needed elsewhere. The speed of receiving cash told only part of the story.
Bags' lender review, as he described it, included documentation, terms, covenants and approval requirements. Its subscription platform combined bookkeeping with financial reporting and a network of more than 60 lenders. That places Taylor in a less glamorous corner of entrepreneurship: helping someone examine the conditions attached to the money they are relieved to have found.
The recognition, and the people around it
Taylor appeared on Black Enterprise's 40 Under 40 list recognizing achievements in 2024, announced in January 2025. He was included in business and finance. Responding publicly, he gave credit to the Bags team and pointed to its work delivering clean books. An award for a person became an occasion to talk about the work of an organization.
He had also been named to The Creative Collective's Creative Class of 2024. The mix is revealing: finance appears alongside a career that has crossed sports, fashion technology and creative communities. Small-business accounting is often presented as a narrow specialty. Taylor arrived through several different doors.
His mother, Edith Cooper, has publicly identified herself as a Bags adviser and celebrated the company's inclusion in Google's economic impact work. In 2024, a Brunswick entrepreneurship newsletter also noted Taylor ringing Nasdaq's opening bell at a Google event. There is a pleasing distance between the ceremony of an exchange bell and the monthly task of reconciling an owner's books. Both belong in this story.
Help that survives the wire transfer
In November 2025, Bags and TruFund Financial Services announced a partnership initially focused on Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama and New York. The program connected financial preparation and ongoing support to TruFund's small-business lending. Eligible borrowers could receive financial-document analysis, reporting, debt-management tools and coaching before and after funding.
That last detail matters to Taylor's developing argument. A completed application marks one point in a business's life. The owner still has to put the capital to work and make the payments. Building support into the period after funding gives the original promise a longer timetable.
The following month, Bags announced a $2.75 million round led by the Ford Foundation, with investors including the Partnership Fund for New York City, Zeal Capital Partners and Slauson & Co. The company planned further product development and partnerships with mission-driven lenders. Alongside the raise came a free AI-powered financial review intended to identify errors in business books and explain possible fixes.
Taylor's public message around that launch returned to a familiar frustration: a business can be stronger than its records suggest. That is a particular kind of entrepreneurial ambition. The customer has already done the hard work of making something people want. Taylor wants the paperwork to catch up in time for the next conversation. The bag, after all, comes with receipts.