Saeed Amidi

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Saeed Amidi is the founder and chief executive of Plug and Play, an innovation platform and accelerator founded in 2006 in Silicon Valley that works with startups and corporate partners worldwide. He has more than thirty years of experience building businesses across real estate, bottled water, packaging and technology investing. His family moved from Iran to the United States in 1979, and in that same year, as a student at Menlo College in California, he started a bottled water distribution company, moving into technology investing in 2000. In 1988 the family's Amidi Group acquired 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto and rented its space to young companies, and Amidi and his partner Pejman Nozad invested in several of those tenants at an early stage. Since its founding, Plug and Play has worked with tens of thousands of startups and made more than two thousand investments, with a portfolio that includes over thirty companies valued above a billion dollars, among them Dropbox, PayPal, LendingClub, N26 and Honey.