Volition wants to be DigiKey for industrial parts

Image Credits: Haje Kamps / TechCrunch

If you’re an electrical engineer, DigiKey, Octopart and Mouser are permanently etched into your browser history — all the components you might need, at your fingertips. Volition just raised $11 million to become the same indispensable supplier for mechanical and industrial engineering: think motors, gears, pneumatics, hydraulics, controllers, sensors, measuring and test equipment, and a lot more. Checking out the company’s beta site, I found components I didn’t know existed, far less what they would be used for.

The company claims it has built out the world’s largest catalog of these components (16 million and counting) by partnering with some major industrial distributors.

“I grew up in a manufacturing family in the Rust Belt of Western Pennsylvania, and I was always building things and going to factories. After…