Avnet announces acquisition of Dragon Innovation

Components distributor Avnet has announced its acquisition of Dragon Innovation, expanding its portfolio of offerings for customers as they move from design to prototype to volume production.

For the past eight years, Dragon Innovation has been seeking to reinvent the way companies manufacture products at scale. Through its cloud-based platform, paired with a team of hardware manufacturing experts, the company manages the full manufacturing process, from strategy and planning for earlier stage products to factory selection and production oversight.

“By providing customers with the fastest, simplest, safest way to manufacture at scale, Dragon Innovation’s vision is to make manufacturing feel easy,” said Dragon Innovation CEO Scott N Miller. “We use a combination of technology and human expertise built into accessible, straightforward online tools.”

Avnet believes Dragon Innovation complements its own breadth in the industrial market with strong consumer electronics market experience, having worked across a wide range of industries including emerging IoT vertical segments such as home automation, wearables, robotics and automotive. The latter said to help customers understand manufacturing costs and schedules, find factories and manage production as they scale their businesses.

“With the addition of Dragon Innovation to our connected ecosystem, Avnet further meets the needs for companies of all sizes head on, helping them launch new hardware products in an efficient and cost-effective manner that accelerates time to market,” said Avnet CEO Bill Amelio. “Dragon Innovation’s hardware manufacturing expertise augments Avnet’s design and supply chain capabilities beyond electronic components to encompass the entire finished product. Equally important, Dragon Innovation complements our digital strategy by delivering their services through a combination of software and access to subject matter experts matched to the customers’ needs as they move swiftly through the stages of product development.”

The acquisition of Dragon Innovation further enhances Avnet’s role in developing new technology products by simplifying the manufacturing process, particularly for those projects that advance Internet of Things (IoT). Avnet’s acquisition of both Premier Farnell (which included its element14 community) and Hackster.io last year expanded the company’s reach to more than two million customers and an active community of more than 750,000 entrepreneurs, makers and engineers. In May, Avnet, through a collaboration with Dragon Innovation and Kickstarter, announced Hardware Studio, an initiative that will give creators access to expertise, tools and resources to supply, design, build and deliver their ideas to market.

Miller said Dragon Innovation is “thrilled to be joining Avnet”, describing its acquisitor as “an established market leader who shares our values and has significant resources and reach to enable us to help companies build hardware better than ever before”.