SYDNEY -- Altium has signed a definitive purchase agreement to acquire Octopart, a provider of electronic parts data and custom inventory search.

The deal is expected to close in late August, subject to customary closing conditions, and Altium expects to retain all 15 of Octopart's New York-based employees. The combined transactions are expected to be accretive to Altium's earnings in its fiscal 2016.

The electronics design software company also completed the acquisition of Ciiva, developers of cloud-based electronics component management software. All of Ciiva's 11 engineers have joined Altium.

Alitum did not disclose the purchase prices of the two startups but said the combined investment was less than half the capital raised by the company in a stock placement in last year and could have been funded out of free cash flow. In September 2014, Altium raised nearly $45 million in an institutional share placement.

"The acquisitions of Octopart and Ciiva represent a significant step in the evolution of Altium's content strategy," said Altium CEO Aram Mirkazemi. "Tightly integrating CAD models and parts supply information will bring a state change to the way in which parts selection and component management are performed during and after the design process is completed."

Content on the Octopart website includes market and technical data for over 30 million electronic and industrial components. Octopart provides advertising and marketing services to electronic component distributors and manufacturers, and has a reported user base of more than 500,000 makers, engineers and component purchasers. Octopart has developed long-term, recurring-revenue relationships with these component distributors and manufacturers. Altium said.

"Octopart will be the basis for Altium's next-generation smart content creation and delivery platform, where part information, design data and supply chain intelligence will come together to accelerate and inform the design process for engineers," said Mirkazemi. " This acquisition will allow Altium to monetize in a way that will make its efforts in content creation and delivery to be sustainable."

In commenting on the acquisition, Octopart's Co-founder and CEO Sam Wurzel stated "we share Altium's vision for the need to improve how electronic part information is captured and sourced in order to help engineers design with greater confidence. We believe that everyone involved in the product development lifecycle can benefit from the bringing together of Altium's content and design tool expertise with Octopart's data and search capabilities. We are excited to pursue the opportunity to deliver smart content and actionable supply chain intelligence to makers and design engineers as they develop the next generation of connected devices".

In conjunction with the acquisition of Octopart, Altium also has completed the acquisition of Swiss company Ciiva. Ciiva's cloud-based electronic component management system brings together supply chain intelligence from information sources that traditionally have been fragmented and places this intelligence at the engineer's fingertips. The system also includes a fully-traceable, version-controlled bill of materials (BOM) management feature, where every component used in a BoM is linked to an access controlled, centralised component library.