Initiative Opens Plug and Play Startup Camp, and $25K, to SD Startups

Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play Tech Center has opened its Startup Camp program to San Diego-based seed-stage companies under a new initiative organized by StartupCircle and Alex Roudi, a San Diego real estate investor.

San Diego companies that qualify for the Startup Camp program also would be eligible for $25,000 in startup funding, according to Gabriela Dow of StartupCircle. The deadline for applications, available online, is Jan. 30, she added.

“The $25,000 is the attention getter, but it’s really about getting companies into the program,” Dow told me in a phone call this afternoon.

San Diego startups would spend roughly three months in San Diego, followed by 10 weeks in the Plug and Play Startup Camp in Silicon Valley. The program features a combination of structured workshops, speaker series, mentorship sessions, and coaching. Companies that complete the Startup Camp also would get an opportunity to make a presentation to venture investors at a “Demo Day” event, Dow said.

In an extended interview in another Xconomy post today, Plug and Play CEO Saeed Amidi told my colleague Wade Roush that he’s been looking for ways to move beyond the confines of Plug and Play’s main headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA, where most of the organization’s 300 startups are encamped.

Dow says the San Diego StartupCamp would operate much like the accelerator program that Plug and Play established recently in Calgary. About 80 Canadian companies applied, and a local panel of judges winnowed that to 14 finalists. Only four startup were admitted to the program. Every company accepted into the Startup Camp program is eligible to receive $25,000 in funding.

While the selection process is intended to be rigorous, Dow said there is no limit to the number of startups that can be admitted and funded. More information is available online here.

In San Diego, the selection competition and program will be administered by Roudi, the chairman and CEO of Interwest Capital, and StartupCircle, an organization that brings together entrepreneurs, investors, and others.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.