Volition Raises $11M to Scale Industrial Parts Marketplace

On May 22, online industrial parts marketplace Volition announced $11 million in seed funding led by Newark Venture Partners and Quiet Capital, with major participation from Lachy Groom, Alan Rutledge, Julian Capital and Humba (Susa) Ventures, according to a news release.

Volition says it is the only online industrial parts marketplace designed specifically for the needs of the hardware development world. The intent of the marketplace is to “accelerate the pace of hardware innovation” by acting as a central hub that organizes myriad components, the company said.

The company said the funding will allow it to scale it’s already vast marketplace.

“Volition is the first marketplace for the $2 trillion industrial components industry that helps engineering and purchasing teams find and buy all of the parts they need to prototype and manufacture their designs,” said Nick Pinkston, co-founder and CEO of Volition. “My co-founders and I previously ran Plethora, a custom manufacturing company, and we spent far too much time just searching for the right parts to build our factory and our customers’ products. To solve for that, we built the world’s largest catalog of these components — 16 million products and growing — by partnering with industrial distributors and using our uniquely scalable data technology to quickly list products for sale.”

Pinkston was a panelist speaker at MDM’s 2022 SHIFT Conference.

Many industrial distributors have not been able to keep pace with the overall eCommerce expansion, Volition said, including the approximately 400,000 small and niche suppliers in that realm. Volition said scaling its marketplace can allow many customers to start searching across a huge collection of products before filtering down to solely the products that meet their exact specifications.

“This is the first time this has ever been possible because generic marketplaces like Amazon and Alibaba are unable to make sense of the vast array of structured product data required to produce this user experience,” Volition said.

Volition, which was founded in 2019, is made up of hardware “engineers and enthusiasts” who worked together at various manufacturing tech companies building software, hardware and production systems, according to the company’s website.