Plug and Play - by Anmol Mehta
We had the opportunity to visit Plug and Play Tech Center on Friday, the 17th of May for one of their Friday pitch sessions. Plug and Play Tech Center is an early stage investor and corporate innovation platform specializing in the development of early-to-growth stage technology startups. They present themselves as a complete global startup ecosystem.
Plug and Play extends worldwide through established programs in Europe, South America, and South-East Asia. With over 200 corporate and investor partners, Plug and Play has helped over 3000 startups. Their portfolio has raised over $3.5 billion in funding with over 100 successful exits to date. Famous companies such as Google, Dropbox, LendingClub, and PayPal are all invested by Plug and Play.
We were initially led by an intern called Afifa at Plug and Play who briefed us about what Plug and Play is, what they do and how they make money. She was working on the investments side. We learned about the different stages of investment they do and several of their successful exits over the last few years. We also learned about their accelerator program which their corporate partners play a huge role in.
We then moved to the pitch session to listen to several startups pitch their ideas to investors and VCs. There were 22 startups who came to pitch at Plug and Play. The topic of the day was health technology - including health, medical devices, BioTech, Therapeutics and even Housing as a service. All these startups were in different stages of their funding, with some of them in the pre-seed and seed stage (raised <1m), some in the early stage (raised seed round) whilst some of them were almost done with raising all the money they wanted, their growth stages (raised >10m).
We learned a tremendous amount from the startup’s pitches. Each person representing a company was given 4 minutes for pitching. After the pitching of each company, one question was asked by the investors and experts. We observed a common structure for the pitches - people who were pitching would use some time introducing their products, some on their marketing and financial plans and a surprising amount of emphasis was laid on the team carrying out the idea too. We also learned several soft skills from their pitching – Things such as composure, coherent speech and selling one’s idea/products effectively.
After the pitch session, we joined the lunch and networking session from 12:15 pm to 1 pm. We met several of the startup founders, CEOs, and people who were pitching. Some of us even met investors and experts. All in all, this was a great opportunity to make good connections and understand the personalities that some these people exude.