Underpinning everything in software is a huge hardware industry—representing hundreds of billions annually. The market for selecting, designing, and purchasing these electronic components is dominated by a handful of incumbent players. Breaking into this space, and about to do some very interesting things, is SnapMagic: a search engine for component designs used by 2M engineers each year and growing.
SnapMagic’s secret sauce is its large-scale repository of high-quality, vetted electronic component design information (symbols, footprints, and 3D CAD models), which makes it faster and easier for engineers to find what they need for their product designs. SnapMagic earns revenue by digitizing demand generation. They make money from suppliers who pay each time their component design is downloaded (similar to how fees are collected for ad placement in search engines). Building the largest ever search engine for electronic components and having an incredible head start is exciting to us—this platform has real virality and network effect.
Now, SnapMagic is expanding into design—with an AI Copilot that auto-places PCB components based on the desired functionality. This is the kind of AI application I love—it eliminates mundanity, rather than trying to replace creative thinking, and it could only be built by SnapMagic, since they own the proprietary dataset necessary for great outputs.
Founder Natasha (formerly a R&D engineer and product marketing engineer at National Instruments) has successfully led the business to break-even in very little time, with downloads growing exponentially since launch and a strong enterprise customer base. With the Copilot launch coming up, 2025 will be a year to watch, as SnapMagic grows from a search engine to a platform unlocking new productivity gains in component design.