#025: Powered by Sunlight, Fenced by Software: Inside Monil's Cattle Collar

Monil makes a cattle collar that replaces physical fencing. Farmers draw grazing boundaries in an app, and the collar keeps the herd inside them using GNSS positioning and cellular IoT, with no towers, base stations, or wire in the ground. It runs on solar through an entire grazing season and weighs 2.2 pounds, the lightest cattle collar on the market.

François and Chris sit down with Monil Co-Founder and CEO Torstein Nesse to get into how that gets built. Torstein came out of Silicon Labs before starting Monil in 2022, and the company has since put more than 50,000 collars into the field across Norway, Sweden, and the UK, grown revenue fivefold, and raised $10M to take the product into the US. The conversation traces the path from a very specific idea about livestock to a deployed fleet, covering the power constraints that shaped every other decision, what testing looks like when your environment is a working pasture, and how the team ships updates to devices scattered across open country. 

If you build devices that have to survive without you, this one is worth your time.

What You’ll Learn

• How Monil landed on cellular IoT and GNSS for virtual fencing, and what the architecture had to get right
• What designing around a solar power budget forces you to give up elsewhere in the device
• How the team validates reliability when the test environment is a working farm
• What it takes to add new sensing capabilities, like heat and calving detection, to hardware already in the field
• How Monil thinks about update cadence for a device on a live animal
• What real-world use on real animals surfaced that the team did not see coming

Why You Should Listen:

Whether you’re a product leader, engineer, or builder, this episode is packed with practical insights, real-world lessons, and behind-the-scenes stories from a company redefining what connected products can be.