There are venture firms that write big checks and take board seats, and then there is Plug and Play, a firm that, by its own EMEA partner’s admission, doesn’t really behave like a VC at all. In this episode of 0100 Impact Talks, host Laura Iriarte Zabalaga sits down with Thomas Bigagli, who leads investment and fund strategy across Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Plug and Play Ventures, to unpack a model built less around picking winners than around plugging founders into an ecosystem of over 550 corporate partners across 60 offices worldwide. The conversation moves from the accidental origin story of Silicon Valley’s most unlikely startup campus to a sharper, more uncomfortable diagnosis of why Europe struggles to grow its best companies, and it isn’t the one most LPs are used to hearing.
From a spare office building to the world’s largest open innovation platform
Plug and Play’s history reads less like a fund thesis and more like a founding myth. Bigagli traces it back to Saeed Hamidi, an Iranian entrepreneur who left Iran in the 1970s, built a career in California real estate and industrial businesses, and ended up with an underused office building across the street from Stanford. Rather than leave it empty, he let a handful of scrappy entrepreneurs move in, among them two Stanford students named Sergey and Larry, whose company would become Google. PayPal, Logitech, Dropbox and Danger followed through the same building, and Hamidi started writing angel checks to the founders working under his roof. By 2006, that informal habit had become the League of Entrepreneurs; by 2012, after the subprime crisis, it had scaled into an open innovation platform connecting large corporations and governments to startups. Plug and Play Ventures, the fund arm most LPs actually recognize, came later, built on top of that infrastructure rather than the other way around.
That sequencing matters, because it explains why Plug and Play doesn’t fit neatly into the categories LPs use to underwrite venture managers. Today the firm runs nine funds, invests more than $1 billion in total asset value, and closes over 200 deals a year across geographies as varied as France, the UK, Germany, Lithuania and Morocco. But Bigagli is emphatic that scale isn’t really the differentiator. “We are not competing as most of the VCs are actually co-investing,” he tells Iriarte. “Plug and Play has been mostly a strategic investor and not a lead.” The firm rarely takes board seats and rarely leads rounds, instead, its pitch to founders is access: to more than 2% of the world’s unicorns already in the portfolio, to 550-plus corporate partners who can become customers, and to an international office network that can plug a startup into new markets long before it’s ready to raise a Series B.
Investment-as-a-Service: turning corporate LPs into active operators
The mechanism Bigagli has spent much of the past decade designing is what Plug and Play calls Investment-as-a-Service, a model that lets large corporations invest in startups either directly, deploying their own capital and doing their own diligence, or indirectly through Plug and Play acting as an outsourced operating partner: sourcing dealflow against a corporation’s thesis, running the analysis, and supporting the portfolio after the check is written. It’s a structure built around a candid observation about corporate venture capital, a category Bigagli says gets unfairly flattened into a single story. “Not all of the large corporations are investing via CVC,” he explains. Many invest straight off the balance sheet and simply brand it as a CVC arm, and governance varies wildly from one to the next — some CVCs report to the CEO, others to the CFO or CTO, some are purely strategic, and others chase M&A pipeline. The old fear that CVCs muscle into board seats and squeeze founders, he argues, describes an earlier era. “This is no longer true,” he says. “They did understand that to not lose deals, they cannot be lead or co-lead. They should rather be a strategic investor” — the same lesson, in effect, that Plug and Play built its entire model around.
The uncomfortable truth about Europe’s capital gap
The most pointed section of the conversation is also the most useful one for LPs weighing European exposure. Iriarte pushes Bigagli on where European venture is actually struggling, expecting the familiar answer: not enough capital, especially against the current AI mega-rounds. Bigagli doesn’t dispute that European funds are undercapitalized relative to their American peers. But he insists that isn’t the root problem. “I do think where European capital is struggling the most is really on growth,” he says. “It’s not that we, of course, yes, we are lacking money... but even before the hype of AI, we already had this issue.” His argument is structural rather than volumetric: European funds negotiate too cautiously, move too slowly, and simply can’t compete on speed or brand with the Sequoias of the world when a hot founder is choosing between term sheets. “If Sequoia wants to invest versus a tier-one growth fund in Europe, the probability that they would take Sequoia is really high... They can open more doors,” he says — which lets the best American funds cherry-pick the handful of companies that actually reach growth stage, leaving European vehicles to fight over what’s left.
That dynamic, in his telling, becomes a genuinely circular problem for fundraisers. “Why we don’t have more capital is because we are struggling to deploy,” Bigagli argues. “It’s like when you work in a company, and you negotiate a budget, and by the end of the year, you cannot spend all your budget. Will you have a bigger budget next year? No.” Underdeployment by existing European growth funds, in other words, becomes the evidence institutional LPs use to justify allocating less to the next one — a chicken-and-egg dynamic that no amount of fresh EIF or BPI capital fixes on its own, since public money in Europe typically only unlocks once a manager has already lined up matching private commitments tied to deployment in a specific geography.
Building funds around what LPs actually want, and betting on hardware next
The back half of the episode turns to how Plug and Play actually constructs a fund. Generalist vehicles, Bigagli says, are underwritten almost purely on financial return; industry-specific and geography-specific funds have to deliver more: trend access, LP networking, local ecosystem impact, because that’s what the corporate, family-office and government LPs backing them are actually buying. In the Middle East and Africa, where Plug and Play works more with governmental and international institutions than corporates, he describes a region moving so fast that generalizations barely survive the recording of the episode, and points to Plug and Play’s own Valencia headquarters, a quirk of history tied to the same Aquaservice-owning family behind the firm’s founding, as a case study in how unglamorous geography can still become a genuine innovation hub.
Asked to look ahead, Bigagli doesn’t hedge. “The software industry has become almost a commodity... Physical AI is literally booming. The hardware and deep tech is becoming the next blue ocean,” he says, framing the current AI cycle as one phase in a longer arc that took him from pre-COVID to post-COVID venture and now into a talent war for the teams building the next generation of physical, not purely digital, companies.
For LPs and GPs trying to read where European and EMEA venture goes from here, the episode’s real value isn’t the CVC taxonomy or the fund count — it’s Bigagli’s insistence that Europe’s growth-stage weakness is a discipline problem before it’s a capital problem, and that the firms willing to move faster, not just raise more, are the ones that will actually close the gap.
