Digi-Key Corp. (doing business as DigiKey) is a privately held distributor of electronic components and automation products headquartered at 701 Brooks Avenue South, Thief River Falls, Minnesota. It was founded in 1972 by Dr. Ronald Stordahl, initially selling digital Morse-code keyer kits by mail order, and remains privately held with no publicly traded ticker or disclosed parent company. Size estimates vary by source: Forbes ranked DigiKey #151 on its 2024 list of America's largest private companies (revenue threshold $2 billion) and #171 on its 2025 list (threshold $3 billion for FY2024); Forbes/FactSet lists revenue around $5.1 billion and roughly 5,000 employees, while NPR reported about 3,800 U.S. jobs and PitchBook lists about 4,700 employees. Employee-count figures are inconsistent across sources.
Operations. DigiKey is an authorized, catalog-style distributor rather than a manufacturer. It stocks and ships semiconductors, passives, interconnects, electromechanical parts, sensors, lighting, wireless modules, test and measurement equipment, tools, and industrial automation products — reportedly 17+ million parts from over 3,000 manufacturers — through digikey.com and its DigiKey Marketplace, serving design engineers, procurement professionals, manufacturers, hobbyists, and students. It ships roughly 25,000 orders daily from its Thief River Falls warehouse to about a million customers in over 170 countries, and also offers design tools and technical support.
Litigation posture. DigiKey is an operating company and a pure defendant: one tracked case as defendant, zero as plaintiff. That case is Daedalus Prime LLC v. Arrow Electronics, Inc. et al., No. 1:22-cv-01107 (D. Del., filed Aug. 23, 2022, Judge Richard G. Andrews), in which DigiKey was named alongside Arrow, Avnet, Future Electronics, Mouser, Newark, NXP, Rochester Electronics, and automotive defendants. Plaintiff Daedalus Prime is characterized by Unified Patents as an NPE/PAE and asserts patents it acquired from Intel (including Nos. 8,775,833 and 8,898,494). DigiKey's case was voluntarily dismissed on Feb. 28, 2023; Delaware, not the Eastern District of Texas, was the venue for this docket.
Context. Daedalus Prime filed parallel suits and an ITC complaint (Inv. No. 337-TA-1332, Certain Semiconductors and Devices…), which also named DigiKey as a respondent and was terminated in early 2023. The asserted patents concern processor power/performance management, with accused products described as semiconductors used in automotive infotainment and instrument clusters — a passive end-user/distributor exposure rather than a DigiKey technology dispute.