Plug and Play, an acclaimed startup incubator and accelerator based in Silicon Valley, Calif., has announced plans for a new location in Sugar Land, focusing on solutions for the future of smart cities.  

Plug and Play accelerated more than 2,700 startups globally in 2023, through work to connect entrepreneurs and startups with valuable resources to help their ideas succeed. The organization is three-pronged, with accelerator programs to help startups, a corporate innovation division for established companies, and venture capital to fund promising enterprises.  

Representatives from the Sugar Land Office of Economic Development attended the announcement for the new location at Plug and Play’s November 2024 Silicon Valley Summit.  

“We are excited to welcome Plug and Play to Sugar Land,” Mayor of Sugar Land Joe Zimmerman said. “This investment will help us connect with corporate contacts and experts in startups and businesses that would take us many years to reach on our own. It allows us to create a presence, attract investments and jobs to the city, and hopefully become a base of operations for some of these high-growth companies.” 

The new location, to be located in Sugar Land Town Square, will officially launch in February or March 2025, with around 15 startups and 4 full-time employee equivalents. The approaches toward smart cities will include startups that focus on energy, health, transportation and mobility. 

The Partnership’s trade missions to California in 2022 and 2023 included visits to Plug and Play’s headquarters, fostering discussion on potential for growth in Greater Houston. These visits and continued conversations helped build momentum that led to last week’s announcement for the investment in Sugar Land.

“The Partnership is excited for the announcement of Plug and Play’s investment in the Houston region,” Greater Houston Partnership SVP of Economic Development Craig Rhodes said. “Houston’s innovation ecosystem seeks solutions in key industries of energy efficiency, life sciences, aerospace and transportation, and we are pleased to welcome Plug and Play to the Greater Houston area to accelerate these emerging technologies” 

The new location underscores the region’s growing innovation ecosystem, seeing substantive growth not only in Houston proper with impactful incubators such as the Ion or Greentown Labs, but also around the region, with industry-specific accelerators like Halliburton Labs on the North Beltway and the Alexandria Center for Advanced Technology in The Woodlands. 

For more on Houston’s innovation ecosystem, visit our Innovation and Startups page.