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#025: Powered by Sunlight, Fenced by Software: Inside Monil's Cattle Collar
Chapters
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| Teasers
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| Intro: Meet Torstein Nesse: How he got started in embedded engineering 10:04 The challenges of adding security to embedded systems
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| The challenges of adding security to embedded systems
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| Torstein's journey from embedded security to starting Monil
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| Why virtual fencing for cattle?
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| What is Monil, exactly?
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| Keeping virtual fences working without cellular coverage
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| Balancing solar power, GPS, and battery life
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| Choosing Nordic silicon and a dedicated GNSS receiver
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| Detecting stuck animals and sending lifesaving alerts
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| Planning firmware updates around grazing season
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| Monitoring device behavior and cellular connectivity
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| A four-month cellular network debugging challenge
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| Calibrating magnetometers for livestock collars
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| Safety considerations and certification for virtual fencing
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| Monil’s business model and the ROI for farmers
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
About the webinar
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.
Speakers
Torstein Nesse
Torstein Nesse
With Memfault's co-founders, joined by Monil's co-founder and CEO, Torstein Nesse.
Founder & CEO, Memfault
François Baldassari
François Baldassari is the CEO and Founder of Memfault. An embedded software engineer by trade, François was driven to start Memfault by his passion for tooling and automation in software engineering. Prior to Memfault, he ran the firmware team at Oculus and built the operating system at Pebble. François has a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Brown.
Co-Founder & CTO, Memfault
Chris Coleman
Chris Coleman is the CTO and Co-Founder of Memfault. Prior to founding Memfault, Chris was an embedded software engineer at Pebble and Fitbit where he led efforts across the firmware stack and developed a reputation for tracking down and fixing challenging firmware bugs. That, coupled with his passion for using tooling to efficiently deliver high-quality hardware products, drove him to start Memfault.