Nordic Semi buys Memfault for $120m
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Nordic Semiconductor is buying US startup Memfault for $120m for its cloud-based software monitoring platform.
The Memfault cloud platform that monitors equipment in the field and supports secure over the air updates across the Internet of Things (IoT). It has 100 customers, with a significant number using Nordic low power communications chips.
Other semiconductor partners include Infineon Technologies, NXP Semiconductors and STMicroelectronics as well as microcontrollers from Silicon Labs, Microchip, Renesas Electronics, Alif, Espressif and Texas Instruments. There will be a standalone offering that will continue to support these devices, says Nordic.
“We are moving up the stack but not perhaps for the reason that you might think,” Kjetil Holstad, EVP of corporate strategy at Nordic Semiconductor tells eeNews Europe.
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“Memfault is super interesting and we have been working very closely with them through almost all of their journey. In that same time Nordic has been on a journey to be more than a hardware provider and more of a complete solution provider,” said Holstad. “We have the ultralow power chips and we are also known for our SDKs and software offering. Now we offer the cloud connectivity and cloud lifecycle management, taking away all the complexity for our customers and allowing them to work on the upper layers of their products.”
“The Memfault customer base has a strong overlap we are talking to the same people. When you sell chips and a complete solution you talk to different people, product development vs operations, but they are still the same customers. For us it’s about being a solution partner for the entire lifetime of the product,” he said.
This is the second acquisition is many weeks under new CEO Vegard Wollan.
Memfault, with 60 staff in California, New York and Berlin, has been tapping into the explosion in software complexity. “The software complexity of the products we serve has grown over the years, with millions of lines of code and multicore devices,” said Holstad.
“We already have an R&D team for lifecycle management with our cellular business and that team will merge with Memfault. There are a lot of opportunities where we can take this solution in house to monitor and observe nodes in the cloud. Through the partnership with cellular partners we had visibility of how the radio behaves and we can now extend that to Memfault.”
How the in-house development works with other semiconductor suppliers is a key question.
“We are pragmatic in helping our customers independent of the hardware they chose,” said Holstad. “Memfault supports non-Nordic customers and that doesn’t change with the acquisition. There might be competing with Linux and Android and other MCU vendors and we are committed to supporting those as well but we want to have a seamless Nordic to cloud stack. Those semiconductor partnerships will come to a natural conclusion relatively soon.”
Memfault customers such as TI, Nvidia, Meditek and Raspberry Pi supplier Broadcom support Linux on microprocessor cores, while Nordic currently only has microcontroller cores.
“We want to take this to the thousands of customers we have on microcontroller but I would love it if Nordic was known as the lifecycle management solution regardless of the silicon,” he said. “We will continue to keep Memfault as a standalone offering and brand and those relationships with non-nordic semiconductor customers will hopefully continue to exist.”
www.memfault.com; www.nordicsemi.com
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