From Deep Tech Breakthrough to Production

There is a moment every deep tech company dreads. Once the prototype and technology is proven, the question becomes: How do you build a thousand of these?

For Liquid Instruments, the Canberra-born test and measurement company, that question arrived with the development of the Moku:Pro. To answer it, the company worked with Avnet — a partner that understands what happens between a breakthrough and a shipped product.

Beyond the Parts Catalogue

Deep tech companies often treat distribution as a commodity: something that happens at the end of the process, once the hard work is done. Avnet's model challenges that assumption directly, better supporting companies as they move toward real-world production.

"If you just want components, you can go anywhere," Michael Valeriano, Avnet’s sales manager for NSW, said. "There are plenty of online stores. What Liquid Instruments needed was a partner that understood the DNA of their design."

Avnet's involvement with Liquid Instruments began during the design phase of the Moku:Pro, well before a single unit was manufactured. That early presence meant choosing components with long-term availability in mind, aligning the system design with real supply chain constraints, and bringing downstream visibility into decisions that would otherwise only reveal their consequences months later.

"Modern engineering is complex because a single design choice today can cause massive supply chain headaches later on," Valeriano said. "Making the right decisions upfront is critical. Every choice affects how a product is built and supplied long term."

De-Risking the Hard Problems

For Liquid Instruments CEO Daniel Shaddock, the most tangible expression of that value came through the Moku:Pro's high-speed interconnects, where the system pushes components close to their theoretical limits. Signal integrity and latency are fundamental to the product's performance, and on a complex multi-board design, getting those interfaces right the first time is far from straightforward.

Avnet Design Services worked closely with the Liquid Instruments engineering team through that challenge, drawing on its expertise in areas outside the team's prior experience.

"We were embedded as a common team," Shaddock said. "They brought their experience to leverage with our fairly fresh design team. That meant our first prototype met requirements, and that is a really big deal in hardware."

Each prototype cycle for a system of this complexity takes up to six months. Saving even one iteration has a material impact on time to market. On the Moku:Pro, the team reached a production-ready design in just three iterations. "Working with Avnet really helped us reduce the number of design iterations significantly," Shaddock said. "The acceleration came from getting those key decisions right earlier, with support from their engineers who had seen these problems before and had great intuition about how to make the right decisions earlier than we could have seen them ourselves."

Delivering When It Mattered Most

Avnet's value was tested most acutely when the Moku:Pro launched during the global supply chain disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Component shortages were halting production lines across the technology sector. For Liquid Instruments, attempting to bring its most ambitious product to market for the first time, the conditions were as difficult as they could have been.

Avnet's role extended across both the design phase and the critical task of ensuring components were delivered to the right quality and on the timelines the launch required. The result was a product that shipped on schedule while competitors struggled to ship at all.

"Without Avnet's support, it wouldn't have been possible to bring Moku:Pro to market on time," Shaddock said. "And perhaps not even at all."

The Overlooked Layer

For engineering leaders evaluating how they approach distribution partnerships, Valeriano points to a gap that frequently goes unexamined.

"Many engineering leaders focus mainly on technology itself and time to market, without realising how much goes on in the background around it: component availability, life cycle planning, how smoothly products are delivered at scale,” he said.
“Avnet's model addresses that overlooked layer, helping turn strong technical ideas into products that can be delivered reliably and repeatedly across regions."

For Liquid Instruments, the proof is in a decade of continued and evolving engagement. The nature of Avnet's support has shifted as the company has grown and built its own internal capabilities, moving from foundational guidance through unfamiliar territory to a collaborative model across increasingly complex projects.

"Avnet's been able to fill gaps where we need support, whether it's technical expertise or supply chain support," Shaddock said. "They've managed to evolve the type of support they give us as we have grown in our own capabilities."

The company recently closed a $50 million Series C round co-led by Keysight Technologies, a global leader in the test and measurement industry. Bigger projects and harder problems lie ahead. Avnet will be in the room for them.

With increasing complexity in both technology and global supply chains, partnerships like this will only become more critical.

"We can take on more ambitious projects with confidence," Shaddock said, "knowing that we have Avnet's support behind us."