Plug and Play sells the introduction.

The landlord had unusually interesting tenants. At 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, the Amidi family’s building housed young companies including PayPal and Google. Saeed Amidi had businesses in packaging, bottled water and property. Technology was something happening down the hall. Getting close enough to watch it happen changed the business he wanted to be in.

The landlord’s education

In a 2023 interview, Amidi recalled Peter Thiel arriving to rent space and the family investing in PayPal. Later came a chance to invest in Google through an angel fund. He met Dropbox’s founders at Y Combinator, invited them over for kebab and co-invested with Sequoia. The kebab is a pleasing detail. The co-investment is the useful one: relationships helped him evaluate businesses he was still learning to understand.

“I often refer to myself as an ‘accidental investor,’” he says in Plug and Play’s 2024 performance report. In 2006, Amidi and co-founder Jojo Flores launched Plug and Play in Sunnyvale. Flores, too, came from bottled water. Their new venture divided office space among startups. Over time, the business expanded into acceleration, corporate innovation and venture investing. A physical address became a way to organize access.

A buyer, with a problem

The company’s proposition makes sense once you consider two people who have trouble finding each other. One has built something useful but cannot reach a large customer. The other works inside a large company and needs a solution, but cannot inspect every startup on earth. Plug and Play scouts, selects and introduces. Its expertise sits partly in technology and partly in knowing which business unit should be in the meeting.

Its customers include corporate innovation teams and operating departments, alongside governments and institutions building startup programs. Founders use the network for business development and investor access. Plug and Play’s 2025 report lists more than 550 partners across over 25 industries. That breadth gives it a different pitch from a narrowly focused investor: the next relevant buyer may sit in another sector, or another country.

A meter beats a mood board

Consider STARTUP AUTOBAHN, established in 2016 with Daimler, Plug and Play, the University of Stuttgart and ARENA2036. Its published process moves from scouting to meetings with relevant corporate teams, then joint proofs of concept and prototypes. An Expo shows the work. Afterward comes the consequential decision: whether a pilot can become an application inside the partner’s business.

One public example involves Nexmachina and Mercedes-Benz in Vitoria, Spain. The startup specialized in wireless technologies. The factory had hundreds of fluid meters across two assembly plants. Their pilot explored monitoring those meters using LoRaWAN, a network designed for small wireless messages. It is an admirably unglamorous problem. You can identify the equipment, the location and the proposed test.

Daimler’s 2020 sustainability report offers another example: a partnership with UBQ Materials, reached through STARTUP AUTOBAHN, to investigate materials made from household waste. Additional feasibility studies were part of the next step. This distinction matters. A pilot demonstrates an avenue worth investigating. Production requires evidence that the material, economics and operating requirements hold up.

Two doors. Different terms.

Plug and Play has publicly offered accelerator participation without fees or required equity. Corporate partners pay annual participation fees for access and innovation support. That arrangement makes the corporate search problem part of the financing model. The venture arm can separately invest in companies. Joining a program does not mean receiving a check, and accepting an investment creates its own financial terms.

The two activities have different scales. For 2025, Plug and Play reported more than 2,800 startups accelerated and over 250 new investments. Those figures describe different activities; they should not be read as an acceptance rate or a funding probability. For founders, the useful distinction is between access to prospective customers and the separate decision to put capital at risk.

In June 2025, the firm announced a $50 million Fintech & AI Fund backed by nine institutional investors, including EXL. Some limited partners had previously participated in its innovation programs. A working relationship could therefore lead to a deeper financial commitment. The fund is investment capital; treating that number as company revenue would tell the wrong story.

The expensive part of free

The practical cost for a founder includes time spent preparing meetings, engineering a pilot and supporting a potential customer. A free program can still absorb a small team’s attention. Corporate pricing depends on the engagement. The sensible calculation compares those commitments with the value of reaching a buyer the startup could realistically serve.

Introductions also leave organizational problems intact. A supportive innovation manager may need purchasing approval, security review and an operating budget before deployment. Plug and Play’s 2026 Japan Summit materials address a related frustration directly: companies implementing AI without seeing the expected results. Its Japan AI Center of Excellence describes support spanning strategy, integration and organizational change. The hard part has moved downstream.

“Innovation doesn’t come from us.”Jojo Flores / co-founder, 2021 interview

Bring a question someone can answer

For a founder comparing accelerators, Plug and Play belongs on the shortlist when corporate access is the immediate bottleneck. A startup seeking only capital should evaluate the investment offer separately. A company still searching for a usable product may find corporate pilot work premature. Alternatives include other accelerator networks, direct enterprise sales and relationships built through existing investors.

What can a reader copy? Start with one operating problem. Name the person who owns it. Agree on a small test and the evidence needed for a purchase decision. That is an editorial lesson from the program’s sequence, rather than a promised outcome. The interesting achievement here is making useful encounters repeatable. Their value becomes visible when someone decides what to do next.