Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play investor plans $100 mln Saudi Arabia VC fund

Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play investor plans $100 mln Saudi Arabia VC fund

Silicon Valley-based tech investor Plug and Play Tech Center, an early backer of firms including Dropbox Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc., is looking to raise $100 million to invest in Saudi tech startups, potentially with backing from a unit of the Kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund.

Plug and Play is in talks with Jada, a $1 billion fund of funds established by the Saudi wealth fund to help kick-start the domestic venture capital industry, Saeed Amidi, the firm’s founder and CEO, said in an interview in Riyadh.

For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.The fund is set to be launched by January, with Plug and Play contributing as much as 10 percent of the total and the rest raised from Saudi funds and family offices, he said. Plug and Play is starting the fund because the quality of Saudi startups has improved over the past few years, Amidi said.

“We are not going to lower our standards,” he said. “We invest in the US, Germany — our quality control is not going to change just because it’s Saudi Arabia, and if I cannot find startups as high quality I will not invest.”

Saudi Arabia is looking to promote