Plug and Play closes $50 million Fintech & AI Fund to drive impact through direct access to global decision makers
SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 10, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Plug and Play, one of the world's most active early-stage investors, announced today during its Silicon Valley June Summit 2025 the closing of its $50 million Fintech & AI Fund with nine institutional investors. Plug and Play runs nine funds in total.
The fund is the largest industry-themed fund the company has raised to date and invests in companies globally. The fund reflects the evolution of the innovation journey taken by many high-profile financial services companies.
Over the years, many of Plug and Play's limited partners have actively participated in pilot and innovation programs and aided in collaborative development efforts. This participation reinforces the partners' trust in Plug and Play and its ability to recognize, fund, and scale innovative technologies.
"Plug and Play's ecosystem has been a valuable source of innovation and market insight," said Sandeep Manchanda, Head of Insurance M&A and Partnerships at EXL, one of the investors of the fund. "With this fund, we're taking that engagement even further - partnering earlier and more strategically with the AI-driven technologies shaping the next chapter of insurance and financial services."
Plug and Play made the fund announcement during the Enterprise & AI Expo, a part of the Silicon Valley June Summit 2025. The event features three days of more than 75 speakers and more than 200 startups coming together to discuss and demonstrate a range of technologies at the company's Sunnyvale headquarters.
"AI is changing everything and industry startups are scaling faster than ever," said Eugenio Gonzalez, Partner at Plug and Play. "The fund supports our value proposition of accelerating sales cycles by connecting companies with the right decision makers at global corporations. It is a key part of this dynamic ecosystem that includes a roster of entrepreneurs and corporations we've developed over the years. It reflects a shift from shorter-form experimentation to long-term value creation as this fund allows us to back exceptional founders earlier and support them more meaningfully as they build the future of fintech, enterprise, and insurtech."
In addition to capital, Plug and Play provides portfolio companies with access to a global network of over 550 corporate partners across more than 25 industries. This network provides startups with opportunities, including pilot projects, customer acquisition, and revenue growth. Plug and Play brings a strong track record, with more than 300 successful exits and a global portfolio of thousands of startups.
About Plug and PlayPlug and Play is the leading innovation platform, connecting startups, corporations, venture capital firms, universities, and government agencies. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, we're present in 60+ locations across five continents. We offer corporate innovation programs and help our corporate partners in every stage of their innovation journey, from education to execution. We also organize startup programs and have built an in-house VC to drive innovation across multiple industries where we've invested in hundreds of successful companies including Dropbox, Guardant Health, Honey, Turing, Lending Club, N26, PayPal, and Rappi. For more information, visit https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/.
© Plug and Play Financial Services Fund I, L.P. (legal entity of the Fintech & AI Fund)
Plug and Play Press ContactJacky TsangSenior Communications & PR Associatepress@pnptc.com
View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/plug-and-play-closes-50-million-fintech--ai-fund-to-drive-impact-through-direct-access-to-global-decision-makers-302477100.html
SOURCE Plug and Play
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Boston Globe
19 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
40 percent of workers see wage growth lagging inflation, study finds
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up AVIATION Advertisement AI air fare pricing is a 'bait-and-switch' says American Airlines CEO American Airlines Group Inc.'s top executive blasted the use of artificial intelligence in setting air fares, calling the practice inappropriate because it could trick travelers. 'Consumers need to know that they can trust American,' chief executive Robert Isom said on a call with analysts after the company reported earnings. 'This is not about bait-and-switch. This is not about tricking.' Isom's criticism of the practice echoes several members of the Congress, who are pushing for answers from Delta Air Lines Inc. on its plans to use AI to help set pricing on as much as 20 percent of its network by the end of this year. Delta said this month that it's still in the testing phase that involves about 3 percent of the network today. Delta says it's testing AI to eliminate manual processes and accelerate analysis for dynamic pricing, a strategy long used by airlines and others to raise or lower fares based on demand, timing, and other factors. It is not using the technology to target customers using personal data, and all customers see the same fares in all retail channels, the carrier said in a statement. 'There is no fare product Delta has ever used, is testing or plans to use that targets customers with individualized offers based on personal information or otherwise,' according to the statement from the airline. 'A variety of market forces drive the dynamic pricing model that's been used in the global industry for decades, with new tech simply streamlining this process.' American is using AI to improve airline operations and recovery from service interruptions and to make it easier for consumers to work with the carrier, Isom said. Employing it in pricing decisions 'is not something we will do,' he said, adding that 'some of the things I've heard are just not good.' — BLOOMBERG NEWS Advertisement MARKETS Advertisement Even as stocks set record, JP Morgan is bullish there are better days to come. The S&P 500 Index's record-setting spree may be stoking concerns about inflated share prices and a revival of meme-stock froth, but JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s trading desk isn't concerned. Rather, it expects the furious rally in US equities to keep going. 'While bullishness is not yet consensus, client conversations reveal that even those that skewed bearish are throwing in the towel,' the bank's head of global market intelligence Andrew Tyler said Thursday in a note ahead of the market open. Recent progress in trade deals, positive economic data, and rekindling mergers and acquisitions activity should keep powering the stock market, according to Tyler. From a technical standpoint, the rally is also being supported by the combination of the momentum unwind and meme mania making it difficult for traders to hold short positions. The market could even 'take a significant step higher' if macroeconomic data holds up and the impending trade deal between the United States and Europe is sealed with China following closely behind, Tyler said. — BLOOMBERG NEWS AUTOMOTIVE Tesla profits slip again amid ongoing slump in EV sales Tesla on Wednesday reported a slump in profit, the third quarterly decline in a row, as the company cut car prices in an attempt to revive sales. The company made $1.2 billion from April to June, down from $1.4 billion a year earlier. Sales fell to $22.5 billion from $25.5 billion in the second quarter of 2024. Tesla has not reported an increase in quarterly profit since the third quarter of 2024. Tesla's weak earnings are likely to reinforce concern among some investors that CEO Elon Musk is neglecting the car business while he focuses the company's resources on autonomous driving software, self-driving taxis, and humanoid robots. Musk has said those technologies will make Tesla the most valuable company in the world. Tesla has begun testing a limited self-driving taxi service in Austin, Texas, and said Wednesday it would expand the service 'rapidly.' Wall Street has largely bought into that vision, and the company's share price is up about 50 percent since early April. But such taxis and robots are not yet generating significant revenue for Tesla, and the company remains reliant on the car business to finance Musk's futuristic plans. — NEW YORK TIMES Advertisement BIG TECH Alphabet earnings surge on growth in AI Whether Google will be a winner in the race for dominance in artificial intelligence won't be clear for at least a year or two. In the meantime, its bottom line is doing just fine. Alphabet, Google's parent company, reported second-quarter results Wednesday afternoon that were better than expected. Revenue rose 14 percent from a year earlier to $96.4 billion, while earnings per share jumped 22 percent to $2.31. Analysts had expected revenue of $93.98 billion and earnings per share of $2.20. 'We are leading at the frontier of AI,' said Sundar Pichai, the company's chief executive. Pichai, who mentioned AI more than a dozen times in his commentary on the quarter, added, 'AI is positively impacting every part of the business.' Investors appeared underwhelmed by the quarterly results. Alphabet shares rose less than 2 percent on the news. One apparent problem: Capital expenditures for the year will be $10 billion higher than the company had projected, it said, because of its booming cloud storage business. Even for Google, the new estimate of $85 billion is real money. A few years ago, Google was spending about a quarter of that sum. Investors want the company to pour enough into new data centers to have competitive cloud and AI businesses but not so much that it affects lush profit margins. That's a difficult balancing act. — NEW YORK TIMES Advertisement
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Stock market today: Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq futures trade flat as Trump downplays Powell tensions
US stock futures held steady after President Trump visited the Federal Reserve and Wall Street digested the latest batch of corporate earnings. Futures attached to the Dow Jones Industrial Average (YM=F), the benchmark S&P 500 (ES=F), and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 (NQ=F) fluttered up 0.1%. Trump visited the Fed on Thursday afternoon to take a tour of its $2.5 billion renovation project, led by chair Jerome Powell. The president has spent weeks criticizing the project as too expensive, sparking speculation he might use it as a pretext to try to fire Powell for alleged mismanagement. During the tour, however, Trump indicated he wasn't considering firing the Fed chair. "To do that is a big move, and I just don't think it's necessary," he said. The president also downplayed his disagreements with Powell over interest rates, saying he believes the chair will "do the right thing." "I'd love him to lower interest rates," the president reiterated. Intel reported its earnings after the bell Thursday, beating Wall Street expectations on revenue. The company's stock turned negative, however, as CEO Lip-Bu Tan discussed layoffs and the cancelation of some factory plans. In day trading, the S&P 500 scored its fourth consecutive record high in a row as Google (GOOG) earnings boosted optimism about the promises of AI. Wall Street also continued to hope that the Trump administration will strike more trade deals before the president's Aug. 1 deadline, even as the risk of higher-than-expected baseline tariffs grows. Read more: The latest on Trump's tariffs This week, Wall Street has largely shrugged off trade tensions as Big Tech earnings roll in. Next week brings more market-moving results from members of the "Magnificent Seven," including Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Meta (META), and Amazon (AMZN).


Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
Trump's AI Orders, Gixel's AR Optics, Big Tech Spends On Nvidia
WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 23: U.S. President Donald Trump displays a signed executive order at an AI ... More summit hosted by All‑In Podcast and Hill & Valley Forum at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium on July 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump signed executive orders related to his AI "Action Plan" intended to promote U.S. dominance of the technology during the event. (Photo by) Trump signs sweeping 'AI Action Plan' and 'anti‑woke' order. The plan emphasises 'beating China' and loosening regulations so data centres and chip factories can be built more quickly. Trump also signed an 'anti‑woke' executive order that bars AI vendors from receiving federal contracts if their models include diversity or equity‑related content. Yikes. AI is the new history book, the new Wikipedia. Imagine if all our content came from the same oracle. To paraphrase George Orwell: he who controls AI, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future. TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump speaks in the Roosevelt Room flanked by Masayoshi Son (2R), ... More Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp, Larry Ellison (2L), Executive Charmain Oracle and Sam Altman (R), CEO of Open AI at the White House on January 21, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images) OpenAI and Oracle scale back the $500 billion Stargate project from 30 GW to 4.5 GW. Then Software bailed and now they're only going to generate 4.4 gigawatts. That's 85% smaller. They're going to open one data center. There's not going to be a big press conference with the president and cover stories about this. Even so, the new facilities will use more than two million chips (wire that money directly to Nvidia). There was a lot of speculation in the ancient days of January, 2025 that this was not a real deal. It only took six months to unravel. WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 23: Jensen Huang, Co-Founder and CEO, NVIDIA speaks onstage at the All-In and ... More Hill & Valley Forum "Winning The AI Race" at Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium on July 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo byfor Hill & Valley Forum) xAI seeks up to $12 billion in debt to buy Nvidia chips Elon Musk's AI company xAI is working with Valor Equity Partners to raise as much as $12 billion in debt to acquire Nvidia GB200 and GB300 chips for training Grok. According to the Wall Street Journal, lenders want repayment within three years and may cap borrowing to limit risk. Musk said xAI is building multiple superclusters using more than 230,000 GPUs and will soon launch another with 550,000 chips. Nvidia is going to get a significant chunk of that ten billion. This image makes the basic principles very clear. Gixel Emerges from stealth with €5 million seed round led by Brendan Iribe. Their design for AR glasses uses curved lenses, enabling a slim, lightweight form factor suitable for everyday wear. The optics engine delivers variable focal planes, allowing virtual objects to appear at correct depths and fostering natural eye focus dynamics. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, Gixel closed an oversubscribed €5 million seed round, led by Oculus VR co‑founder Brendan Iribe and backed by former 20th Century Fox/RED futurist Ted Schilowitz, the FlixBus founders (Jochen Engert, Daniel Kraus, André Schwämmlein), Germany's federal innovation agency SPRIND, and early‑stage VC firm LEA Partners. The funds will support the industrialization of Gixel's curved‑lens optical engine, development of developer kits, and groundwork for a Series A round in the coming year. Deep fake hoax false and ai manipulation social media on display. Searching on tablet, pad, phone or ... More smartphone screen in hand. Abstract concept of news titles 3d illustration. UC Riverside researchers, in collaboration with Google scientists, have developed an AI model capable of detecting deepfakes. Unlike earlier detectors, their new UNITE software identifies inconsistencies in backgrounds, motion patterns, and subtle visual artifacts. Built on a transformer architecture and leveraging a novel 'attention-diversity loss,' it avoids focusing solely on faces by spreading attention across multiple regions. While still in development, it holds promise for integration into social media, fact-checking, and newsroom workflows, helping curb the spread of sophisticated video misinformation and AI slop in general. Adobe Firefly is about to make its biggest leap in AI video yet with a new model and Veo 3 integration Adobe has just released Firefly Video Model 1.9, a major upgrade that significantly boosts realism and storytelling in AI-generated videos, available now via its Web App. This update enables creators to produce more dynamic natural and urban environments, including detailed animal motion, weather effects, and 2D/3D animation. Firefly also now supports Veo 3, Luma, Runway, and Topaz integrations. Notably, the beta 'Generate Sound Effects' feature lets users craft custom audio via text prompts or voice input. The model also introduces new controls: reference-video input for composition transfer, style presets (like claymation and anime), and keyframe cropping tools. LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - MAY 01: Co-founder and CEO of Runway Cristobal Valenzuela and ... More artist/musician Claire L. Evans speak on stage during the 2024 AI Film Festival Los Angeles Panel at The Orpheum Theatre on May 01, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by) Disney and Netflix are Quietly Using Runway's AI Video Generators. If you recall, Runway is the AI start up that's raised $450 Million and was valued at $3B. They already have a deal with Lionsgate. Netflix has already used Runway's tools to produce a VFX scene in its sci‑fi series The Eternaut, highlighting savings in both time and cost. While Disney is reportedly testing the same technology, neither company has issued formal announcements. Animal Company becomes one of the highest‑grossing Meta Quest games. The social VR game where players use Gorilla Tag‑like locomotion with their arms in a horror‑mystery setting, is a bona-fide bestseller with more than 500,000 daily active users and about one billion views on TikTok. Its average daily playtime is 100 minutes and 45 percent of users return after 28 days. Since monetization began in April, paying users have increased ninefold. This column is also a podcast hosted by its author, Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive, and founding Red Camera executive, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Bilawal Sidhu, Ex-Google PM (XR, maps) and now leading creative voice at the intersection of Generative of AI and media. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube. What We're Reading RP1 says that metaverse needs its own browser (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat)