Michael Olmstead

Michael Olmstead is the Chief Revenue Officer and a Partner at Plug and Play Tech Center, the Sunnyvale-based global innovation platform, accelerator, and early-stage investor founded in 2006. He has been with the firm since around July 2013, where he leads global sales and corporate partnerships — a client base reported to include more than 500 companies valued at $1B+ — and is credited with driving much of the organization's international expansion, including the launch of its first offices in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam, and its involvement in Lafayette Plug and Play in France.

In 2013 Olmstead founded Plug and Play's Brand & Retail program, the firm's first industry-specific accelerator. That vertical-accelerator model — bringing large corporations together to help select and pilot startups — became the template Plug and Play scaled across dozens of other industries and locations, convening well over 100 major corporate partners (names cited include Kohl's, TJX, P&G, and PepsiCo). Through the Brand & Retail program he sourced and helped lead more than 50 commerce-focused seed-stage investments.

He also serves as Managing Partner of the Plug and Play Future Commerce Fund, a follow-on vehicle backed by corporate LPs including Kohl's and TJX, designed to support commerce/retail portfolio companies raising Series A through Series C rounds. Separately, he is described as an angel investor focused on seed-stage companies in retail, payments, and e-commerce in the Bay Area.

Before Plug and Play, Olmstead was VP of Marketing at Zuli, a Bluetooth home-automation startup backed by Menlo Ventures and Logitech. He graduated Cum Laude from Whittier College with a B.A. in Business Administration, concentrating in Marketing and International Business.

• Invests primarily at the seed / early stage in commerce-adjacent categories: retail & brand tech, e-commerce, payments/fintech, and consumer.
• Core strategy is corporate-anchored acceleration — sourcing startups that leading corporations (retailers, CPG, etc.) want to pilot, partner with, or acquire; the accelerator programs run roughly pre-seed to Series B and are "stage agnostic."
• Through the Future Commerce Fund, backs later-stage follow-on (Series A–C) for standout commerce companies, with corporate LPs providing distribution and validation.
• What makes him say yes: startups that map cleanly onto a real corporate-partner need and can convert an accelerator pilot into a lasting commercial relationship or acquisition path.