Plug and Play Brand & Retail

Meet our Plug and Play Brand & Retail Batch 26 startups! 🛍️ From customer research to AI-powered purchases, there’s a lot shaping the future of retail - the 13 startups of Brand & Retail Batch 26 are building the technologies to make it happen: Convey Helps business teams deploy AI agents to carry out complex workflows without engineering support. FLORA Gives creative teams a shared canvas to generate, edit, and organize visual content with AI. Gather Turns business questions into research studies, customer interviews, and actionable insights. Gumloop Lets teams build AI workflows and automate tasks without writing code. American Spend Provides commerce data to help businesses understand spending. Hotbox Turns social media engagement into qualified leads and automated sales workflows. Aron (Formerly: NegotiateAI) Automates supplier price negotiations to help companies reduce purchasing costs. Omnifold Helps brands and retailers forecast demand, plan inventory, and make replenishment decisions. Pogo Connects brands with verified customers for research grounded in real purchasing behavior. Rehearsals Uses AI digital twins to simulate and predict customer behavior. Rwazi Provides multinational companies with actionable data from developing markets on who is buying what, where, and why. Skyfire Gives AI agents verified identities and payment credentials to make purchases independently. Vody Improves product catalogs for AI search and recommendations using customer behavior signals. Over the coming months, we’ll help these founders connect with corporate teams, explore use cases, and find opportunities to work together! 🚀 We’ll be sharing startup spotlights throughout October so you can get to know the founders and the problems they’re solving. Interested in any of these focus areas? Send us a message, and we’ll be happy to chat and collaborate! #RetailInnovation #BrandAndRetail #PlugAndPlayTechCenter

Excited to welcome the new Silicon Valley batches, especially the Lucky 13 startups joining our Brand & Retail Batch 26! 🛍️ 🤩 Hotbox Gather American Spend Skyfire FLORA Vody Rwazi Convey Pogo Aron (Formerly: NegotiateAI) Gumloop Omnifold Rehearsals Welcome all! We can’t wait to see what retail and other innovations you build over the next few months! #RetailInnovation #BrandAndRetail

Startups are pouring resources into R&D, but most leave money on the table. WeGrant and Plug and Play France have partnered to close this gap, giving founders a direct path to public funding and France's Crédit d'Impôt Recherche (CIR). Plug and Play connects founders to our corporate network. WeGrant provides the technology to maximize your funding potential. Find out how much funding your startup can unlock: https://pnptc.in/4ygwaLN #PNP #PNPFrance #WeGrant #CIR #PublicFunding #Startups WeGrant France, Samaher BESBES, Arthur Bessières, Grégoire Luminet, Alba Brotons, Elena Femenía, Francisco Estevan Vítores

Agentic commerce was everywhere at RetailClub AI Festival, yet people still shop, browse, ask questions, and walk into stores. Then what should retailers do to serve the customer when the customer might also send their agent shopping? 🛍️ After three days at RetailClub AI Festival, here are some of our insights: Shopping is not just becoming about agentic, more like multimodal. Customers might browse your site, ask an AI assistant, search with an image, scroll social, use voice, or walk into a store. Retailers need to understand intent and meet them wherever that journey happens. Brand trust still wins in agentic commerce. 42% of consumers would ask AI to include a favorite brand even if it isn’t the cheapest. Agents may compare the options, but brand preference still shapes the shortlist. 44% of retailers are investing in marketing technology, because great marketing and content still matter. As people delegate more tasks to AI agents, brands still need content that keeps them top of mind, while agents need fresh, accurate product information to answer questions and recommend the right products. Stores are the highest intent moments, so give your store associates AI superpowers. Customers are walking in stores already knowing more, comparing more, and being closer to a decision. Your associates need better tools too: instant product knowledge, customer context, recommendations, and AI assistants that help them be more useful in the moment. We also saw startups working across those layers: New Generation on AI-native commerce experiences, Hue. on product discovery, Kahoona on personalization, Alpic on connecting products to AI assistants, and Ekyam.ai on commerce operations. Thank you to Krystina Gustafson and the RetailClub team for bringing everyone together in Huntington Beach! What are your recent insights on retail innovation and AI? #RetailClub #BrandAndRetail #RetailInnovation

Incredible conversations with the retailers and technologies that are shaping the future of agentic shopping. And maybe an even more incredible backdrop here in Huntington Beach! RetailClub AI Festival is in full swing - shoutout out to Krystina Gustafson for bringing together the biggest players in the space for intentional conversations. Drop a line to Kristen Rodgers if you’re in town! See you on the beach! #RetailClub #RetailInnovation #BrandAndRetail

Congratulations to the winners of CoCreate Pitch 2026, Alibaba.com's AI-powered product innovation competition, held September 9-10 in Los Angeles. 🥇 Gold Award ($200,000): Apricotton, founded by Chloe Beaudoin, bras designed to grow with girls through every stage of puberty 🥈 Silver Award ($100,000): FEND Helmet, co-founded by Sujene Kong and Christian Von Heifner, a patented folding commuter helmet. 🥉 Bronze Award ($50,000): HoopDee, Inc Hoops, founded by Roxie Alsruhe, reusable, battery-free NFC silicone rings that track infant breast milk and formula intake. The remaining 17 finalists each received $10,000. Congratulations to all 20 finalists! As end-to-end partner, Plug and Play prepared this year's U.S. finalists to pitch with confidence in front of a live audience, and hosted "Building LA's Next Innovation Economy," a panel discussion on the CoCreate stage exploring what's next for LA as a global innovation hub with Kristen Rodgers (Plug and Play), Erik Haug (Hexaware Technologies), Stephen Stokols (Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) and William Powles (World Trade Center Los Angeles). 🇬🇧 💂 Applications for CoCreate London close October 16th, 2026 at 11:59pm. Don't miss your chance to compete! You can apply directly here: https://lnkd.in/eS5Zfn7X

Plug and Play and Istituto Marangoni Paris launched a 12-week Business Accelerator, bringing our Silicon Valley approach to startup building into the fashion and design classroom for the first time. Students moved from raw idea to investor pitch across four workshops; spotting opportunities, validating ideas, building with AI, and pitching to investors, closing with a Demo Day in front of an expert jury. As Thomas Bigagli 🪐 states "Istituto Marangoni has been shaping talent for 90 years across four continents, and we're proud to be the first innovation platform to bring venture-building and much more into that environment. " A special thank you to Rose Donald (ROSE DONALD, Maison de Haute Botanique Capillaire), Tanguy Frécon (Prolong), Flore Lestrade (Veeton), and Alexis Blez (58 Facettes) for joining us in the room and sharing their journeys with the next generation of founders. This is only the beginning, we'll continue the collaboration at our Beauty Lab event on November 4th, exploring how AI is reshaping how ingredients and formulas are made. Comment below if you'd like the link to attend! Read the full announcement: https://lnkd.in/eBtfhXT6 Arthur Bessières Massimo Casagrande Franck Pouchoulin Zoë Chrysostom Philipp Hodl Hofheinz Arthur Jamon Clémence Pfister Christelle Picart Alba Brotons Carrillo Arsène Favreau

The next class is here: 14 consumer brands landing in LA 🏙️ The Plug and Play team in Los Angeles is running their second Future of Commerce Accelerator in partnership with SHOPLINE and the cohort is officially locked in. Our newest cohort spans food & beverage, beauty, wellness, lifestyle, pet, and more, with founders building everything from functional fragrances to next-gen energy drinks: brands you’ll want to try before everyone else does. Over the next three weeks, we’ll be connecting these 14 brands with an incredible network of consumer operators, investors, retailers, and mentors for hands-on sessions around eCommerce, retail, brand building, customer experience, and fundraising: everything a brand needs to break out. 🌴 For all the LA locals, we will be taking over Venice for our Consumer Brand Showcase. Expect founder pitches, product demos, drinks & bites, and plenty of time to meet the brands, plus a conversation with April Lane, Chief Merchandising Officer at Thrive Market, and Jarret Christie, Founder and Managing Partner at Vibrant Consumer on what actually makes an emerging consumer brand break through. 🎟️ If you're interested in attending, please visit our event page here: https://luma.com/ghrdaabz ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Meet the founders 👉 Jeremiah Borrego (Olas Coffee Company), Avril Han (Sunny Side Up Global), Amy Will (Ojai Essentials LLC), Avinash Nalwaya (Nalwaya Foods), Braeden Riley (No Consequence Energy Drinks), Rodolfo Palafox (Adonis Arcana), Winder Ton (Urania), Paul Harrison (Pablo's Fire), Odera A. Akachukwu (STAYLYTE), Muhammad Ali Rashid (MoboKey), Hammad Yasir Siddiqi (MoboKey), Steven Friedman (Antix LLC), Justin Hyunjae Chung (Korjin), Risus Zhao (Sooz), Muyiwa Ogunsola (Sooz), Claudia Everett (Vedari), and Nitin K. (Vedari) Shoutout to the team that made this happen 👉 Patton Janssen, Emma Church, Omid Asayesh, and Sophie Zhu #startups #venturecapital #ecommerce #cpg #losangeles

Excited to see our portfolio company Complir reach this important milestone! 🚀 Congratulations to Gustav Bang, Tine Kühnel, Marc Kaa Brejner and the entire team on the $11M seed round and on the incredible progress so far. Looking forward to supporting Complir as they continue to build the AI infrastructure for product compliance. Read the full announcement: https://lnkd.in/ddrARPTA

Next week, we’re heading to the RetailClub AI Festival in Huntington Beach! From retail AI to the next generation of commerce, we’re ready to chat, listen and trade notes, and meet the people shaping what comes next across store floors and digital storefronts. Will you be there!? We’re excited to catch up with familiar faces and meet new brands, retailers, and startups in the space. Reach out to Kristen Rodgers or Alise Plotova. We’d love to connect! #retailclub