Element14 and Hackster.io constitute the largest community in the world to support creators, professional engineers and entrepreneurs in the development of technological products. According to reports, the community has more than 1 million registered members now.

Avnet acquired element14 and Hackster.io in 2016. Since then, as technological advances such as the Internet of Things have brought more learning opportunities and the complexity of product development, these two online communities continue to experience rapid growth. In the past two years, the annual growth rate of the members of the community is about 48%.

Element14 is an online community based on discussion. Engineers work together to solve each other's problems in the design, members can see what other engineers are doing, learn their experiences and online training, and get help optimizing their own designs.

Dianne Kibbey, global leader of community and social media at element14, said: “Our members are more active than ever and we have been able to acquire more technology with the support of the Avnet ecosystem.”

Hackster.io is a project-based online community for developers or engineers who want to learn about programming and building hardware. As one of the fastest growing communities in the world, the site also hosts face-to-face seminars and gatherings to help members bring their hardware creativity to a new level.

“With Avnet ecosystem support, we are able to accelerate contact with more people in more locations and provide better learning tools for hardware creation," said Adam Benzion, co-founder and CEO of Hackster.io. “Seeing the skills of our members has become very attractive when they are looking for projects such as blockchain and artificial intelligence and other emerging areas or specific components such as FPGAs.”