The Nexar Story

Nexar, the newest Altium business unit, is a powerful API and data solution that democratizes information and brings people together, enabling them to work more efficiently and make smarter business decisions. It is Nexar’s mission to “Reinvent the business of electronics” by increasing market opportunities for its partners while delivering tangible value to customers, making collaboration across different platforms seamless, connected, and simple. 

Altium, is transforming the electronics industry with innovative PCB design software, tools, and platforms that empower and connect PCB designers, part suppliers and manufacturers to develop and manufacture electronic products faster and more efficiently than ever before. 

In May 2020, Altium launched the world’s only cloud-based PCB design platform, Altium 365. The shift from CAD to cloud was met with great success as the world was in the middle of a global pandemic and evolving the way people worked into virtual and remote scenarios. With the push for cloud-based applications and connectivity, Altium launched the Nexar platform to encompass the cloud-based technology side of the business and to provide a place for continued exploration of new offerings in this space. 

Under the Nexar business unit and part of Altium’s cloud-based offerings is Octopart, the industry-leading component search engine. Octopart brings extensive value with its part data and the legacy Octopart API that has been renamed the Nexar API. With the move of the API under the Nexar brand, it has been enhanced from a rest API to a more powerful API built with Graph QL. Switching to Graph QL allowed the Nexar API to make more powerful queries and to bring valuable industry information about design, supply and manufacturing directly to its users.

In addition to the powerful API, users can tap into Octopart’s robust part data, and gain valuable industry insights through Spectra. Spectra’s data intelligence combines design, supply chain, and manufacturing insights for millions of electronic components to give you a competitive edge in the industry. Spectra’s product offerings include the free Electronic Design to Delivery Index (The EDDI), and the in-depth Supply Chain Resilience (SCR) report.  

The Nexar platform connects software providers, manufacturing services providers, and the electronics supply chain to the largest professional ECAD user community in the world, Altium PCB designers, as well as Octopart’s 6 million strong audience of electrical engineers and purchasers.

Nexar is uniquely positioned to provide a competitive edge to our partners, with Nexar’s API, Spectra’s data intelligence, and Octopart's part database, they can deliver high-impact solutions for businesses throughout the entire industry, from part manufacturers to distributors, EMS, PCBA and everyone in between.