Plug and Play's investments in Piemonte: new frontiers for aerospace startup acceleration in Torino.

Plug and Play is the world's largest Open Innovation platform, with a well-proven record of connecting promising startups with leading corporations. Founded in 2006 in Silicon Valley, the company has expanded its global presence to more than 60 cities and currently boasts a team of more than 800 employees and a network of more than 570 corporate partners and 26 verticals. Plug and Play stands out as a driving force in the global innovation ecosystem thanks to a database of more than 90,000 startups and total investments exceeding $12 billion, with leading companies such as Dropbox, PayPal, N26 and Hippo in the portfolio. In Italy, the company operates through accelerator programs in the Food & Beverage, Fintech, Sustainability, Automotive,  Aerospace & Defence and Smart Cities sectors.

The project in Piemonte

Piemonte region is widely recognized as an excellence in the aerospace, aeronautics, and manufacturing sectors. Its capital city Torino, in particular, has a long history of success in aerospace, with the founding of Fiat Aviazione in the early 1900s, and later Aeritalia, part of the Finmeccanica group, up to the presence of leading key players such as Leonardo and the Thales Alenia Space joint venture. The Politecnico di Torino, founded in the 1920s with Modesto Panetti's aeronautics laboratory and its contribution to the creation of the National Research Council in the 1950s, is a key pillar of innovation in these fields.

The combination of these realities and the current dynamism of the entrepreneurial ecosystem make Torino a city of great value and convergence for investment and technological innovation, and that is why in April 2022, Plug and Play chose to extend its presence in Italy by opening here a new location, of which it is manager and co-investor. This project, called Takeoff Accelerator and focused on Aerospace and Advanced Hardware, is a collaboration between CDP Venture Capital, UniCredit, Fondazione CRT, OGR Turin, Leonardo, Avio, Unione Industriali di Torino, European Space Agency and Italian Space Agency. Takeoff's goal is to attract and enhance pre-seed and seed startups in the Aerospace sector, supporting them in their growth path through a targeted acceleration program while contributing to the growth of Torino as an excellence in this field.

In 2024, the DualTech by Takeoff program was launched as part of the DIANA network created by NATO, with the intention of accelerating the development of advanced dual-use technologies. The first phase of the program involved 8 international startups and SMEs operating in the fields of “Energy Resilience,” “Sensing and Surveillance,” and “Secure Information Sharing.”

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