Volition recently announced an $11 million seed round of funding led by Newark Venture Partners and Quiet Capital, with major participation from Lachy Groom, Alan Rutledge, Julian Capital, and Humba (Susa) Ventures. Volition is the first and only online industrial parts marketplace designed specifically for the needs of the hardware development world. It aims to accelerate the pace of hardware innovation by serving as the hub that organizes all of the world’s components.
The industrial distribution world has not been keeping pace with the broader e-commerce trends and this is even more acutely true for the 400,000 small and niche suppliers in the space. And these teams are without the resources to build a sophisticated online store tailored to their customers’ specific technical needs, especially the massive cost required to create large catalogs of such highly complex products. Meanwhile, their customers are using phones and email to find and source the components they are looking for, a huge waste of time and money.
These customers can now use Volition to search across the largest collection of products ever assembled, and then filter down to just the products that meet their exact specifications. And 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.
To do this, Volition essentially invented a new kind of product data engine able to upload and standardize a massive amount of supplier product content at a scale never before achieved. And this system uses automation and AI to empower human experts to create a high-quality catalog at scale. By solving this problem, Volition is able to organize the entirety of this industry’s products and make them searchable and purchasable in one place.
Volition already boasts many customers from the Fortune 500 and beyond who collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on these components. And the company has also signed a wide range of distributors, who already sell billions of dollars of these products, to list their full catalogs on their platform. This new funding allows them to further scale their marketplace, as well as build out new features that let customers improve their sourcing while increasing retention dramatically.
Volition was founded by Nick Pinkston, Natalie Klapper, and Duffy Tilleman – who all previously worked together at Plethora creating the world’s first “self-configuring” factory. And they are also all lifelong hardware hobbyists: Nick builds race cars, Natalie creates metal sculpture and jewelry, and Duffy with carpentry and construction. Born into a manufacturing family in the Western Pennsylvania Rust Belt, Nick (CEO) has been a manufacturing tech entrepreneur his entire career, on a mission to make hardware development as easy as software development. He created HackPittsburgh (the first maker space in Pittsburgh) and CloudFab (a custom manufacturing marketplace) before starting Plethora.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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 – 16M products and growing – by partnering with industrial distributors and using our uniquely scalable data technology to quickly list products for sale.”
— Nick Pinkston, co-founder and CEO of Volition
“We are in a critical moment for B2B commerce, where consumer trends are spilling over – and managers, as well as C-suite leadership, are looking for ways to modernize, simplify and create efficiencies around how they buy and sell products. B2B marketplaces like Volition – which serves a specific vertical with a set of tools that lower the barrier of entry for low-tech teams are positioned for easy adoption and fast growth. We believe that Nick and the Volition team have the perfect mix of startup grind and industry expertise to make real waves in the industrial components market with this model.”
— Tom Wisniewski, Managing Partner at NVP
