alt Hacker NewsNordic Semiconductor Acquires Memfault
Comments
Nordic makes some good products. When I was doing hardware design for a product that uses a battery my options for power profiling were either not to do it or spend some eye watering amount of money. Then I discovered Nordic makes the PPKII, a cost effective, highly accurate profiler with quite good software. I detect good things in store for the company just based on the quality of stuff they have been putting out.
I have been developing firmware for Nordic chips for about 5 years now, and I have roughly the same amount of experience with Memfault.
The idea of Memfault is like Datadog for IoT stuff. The reality of Memfault is that everyone just uses it to push OTA firmware upgrades through the cloud, and capture stack traces on crashes. Sometimes you bolt on their metrics later, but 95% of the value is in OTA firmware upgrades and crash reports.
Nordic has started to assemble a juggernaut of a tech stack, and a collossal moat. They keep most of their Zephyr contributions outside the main source tree, in something they call the nRF Connect SDK. They've been developing vendor-specific extensions to Memfault's SDK for years.
The upside with Nordic is you get a complete embedded tech stack out of the box. The downside is that, if their stack doesn't doesn't offer what you need, you have to grapple with the incomprehensibly complex SDK in the entire industry. For some companies, it works great. For others, it's an attractive nuisance.
I don't know how much actually changes for either company with this acquisition. It probably isn't good news if you're ST, Infineon, or Microchip.
> Throughout the product lifecycle, continuous software upgrades strengthen the security, performance, power consumption, and functionality of products in the field.
This doesn't feel right to me. Back in the day when I started in embedded systems you would have to get it right before you shipped it. That had it's own problems of course, but at least you knew where you stood and if something worked well it would continue to work well until the hardware died.
Also I think the right word grammatically is continual not continuous. I suspect they changed it because continual software upgrades sounds terrifying.
This is great news. We are implementing memfault, probably in September/October period, but were struggling with the pricing model for long-term growth.
I'm assuming Nordic gives the company the support and reach their mission and discover a more workable business model.
Love Memfault, very happy customer. Hopefully this is a great exit for everyone and a great future for the products.
"allows customers to focus on innovation – free from the burden"
Sounds great, but does it actually mean lock-in, in reality?
[flagged]
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Memfault. We were in the W19 YC batch. I never thought our news would make the front page of HN!
This is a very exciting day for us (after a very intense few months). We've known the Nordic team for years and could not think of a better partner to grow our platform.
Happy to answer questions, if you have them.