With this acquisition, Nordic Semiconductor aims to become a leading provider of Cloud platforms for managing large-scale connected product deployments.
The new integrated platform aims to streamline the development process to significantly shorten time to market.
Nordic ensures that connected devices maintain improved performance and functionality by enabling continuous software updates throughout the product lifecycle.
In an exclusive interview with Electronic Specifier, Øyvind Birkenes, EVP Long-Range at Nordic Semiconductor, emphasised that this platform aims to guarantee that connected devices keep maximum security and optimal energy consumption long after their deployment.
Plans for the acquisition
Nordic and Memfault have been strategic partners since 2021. This marks a major leap in Nordic’s evolution, from hardware supplier to a trusted technology partner providing a complete platform to make development easier, faster, low power, and more secure.
Birkenes added: “Nordic becomes the first semiconductor company to combine best-in-class hardware and embedded software, with a complete cloud platform, transforming how connected products are built, deployed, and maintained.”
SW is a key component of product development. Software complexity has changed dramatically over the last year and Nordic meets the trends to help its customers get to market faster with confidence and trust.
There is also a very significant cost saving opportunity for customers. Memfault commissioned VDC Research to do a study in 2024 that found 29% of the cost of an IoT project is embedded software development. “Building on Nordic means you can avoid a lot of this cost because so much is provided for you,” Birkenes said.
A strategy based on three pillars
To become the leading and complete solutions partner for its customers, Nordic offers the best hardware on the market, the best software and support, and now also the best lifecycle management solutions.
“This enables our customers to focus on what they are best at – designing end-user products, application specific software, and Apps and the end-user interface,” Birkenes explained.
In HW, Nordic is the clear market leader with its ultra-low power wireless SoCs and SiPs. Its products lead the market in power consumption across all its connectivity technology offerings.
Birkenes added: “With the launch of the high-performance and ultra-low power nRF54 Series short-range products, on our new 22nm platforms with fully integrated low-power memories, we have leapt ahead of our competition.”
In SW, the complexity in most products and applications is growing rapidly, a trend which is accelerating. The more software Nordic provides for its customers, the faster they can develop their products.
“Nordic is recognised as the market leader in connectivity software stacks, and we were among the earliest adopters of the Zephyr operating system through the Nordic Connect SDK, a path that many of our peers have since followed,” Birkenes underlined.
The acquisition of Neuton AI which was announced June 2025, adds an important offering to Nordic’s software solutions. The Neuton inference modelling and machine learning solution is a leading Edge AI solution when it comes to ease of use, low power consumption, and memory footprint.
The goal is to become a device lifecycle management solution, as customers increasingly require cloud infrastructure to monitor and manage their devices on-site. Nordic wants to help them with comprehensive solutions.
Birkenes added: “At Nordic we have had a solid and early start with our nRF Cloud offering, especially for location services and device management in our long-range business.”
With the acquisition and combination of Memfault’s Cloud lifecycle management solutions, the features offered in Cloud services are significantly expanding, providing the nRF Cloud with a combination of device management, embedded observability, and location services, enlarging handout to all wireless connectivity technologies.
“This truly makes our new, combined offering disruptive, unique and differentiating from any competing solution,” Birkenes noted.
Offering platform advantages
Nordic’s world-class silicon, paired with Memfault’s device observability, creates an unmatched full-stack solution for connected devices. Memfault is the only observability solution on the market that is purpose built for low-power, intermittently connected, and compute-constrained devices.
Birkenes added: “This means it pairs perfectly with Nordic’s hardware technologies to provide a solution that will allow their customers to dramatically improve visibility of device performance in the field, without sacrificing battery, connectivity, or compute power.”
With Memfault, Nordic customers also get an out-of-the-box solution to manage and deploy firmware updates OTA to their devices in production that is already proven to scale to millions of devices.
Birkenes said: “The combination of OTA management and observability isn’t offered by any other solution on the market and means that updating devices in the field can be completed with much greater confidence and at much lower risk.”
Enabling continuous software updates
With the ability to continuously and reliably update devices in production, manufacturers can not only ensure devices remain secure throughout their lifecycle, but they can also continue to iterate and optimise their product.
Birkenes added: “Manufacturers can use real-world data collected from their devices to inform feature enhancements and performance optimisations that can then be deployed to devices without disrupting the end user experience.”
End users get a product they can trust and that will remain secure long after the original purchase. A case study of a customer using Memfault’s OTA solution to update their million+ device fleet in production, reduced the number of production hotfixes required by 40%.
Integrating capabilities into Cloud services
With the addition of Memfault’s observability offering to nRF Cloud, engineers building on Nordic can enjoy unprecedented levels of visibility into device performance in the field.
“Memfault automatically collects core dumps, logs, and metrics from devices and makes them available for analysis without the end user, or the engineer having to take any manual action,” Birkenes explained.
Using this data helps teams accelerate field testing and improve product quality pre-launch by eliminating elusive bugs. Once in production, teams can resolve issues before they cause widespread problems and without organising expensive returns or site visits.
Birkenes added: “As the fleet grows, prioritising issues vs innovations will be easier, shipping updates to production can happen faster, and customer support can be proactive instead of reactive. Ultimately, with Observability, developing connected products gets easier, cheaper, and more efficient.”
Staying compliant with security regulatory frameworks
This acquisition further strengthens Nordic Semiconductor’s leadership position in addressing current and future market demands.
“As IoT nodes become increasingly intelligent through edge AI, and as security standards evolve under frameworks such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act, Nordic’s software and Cloud services will equip product developers with comprehensive tools to stay ahead of industry and regulatory expectations,” Birkenes underlined.
The ability to deliver automatic security updates in particular, is a core requirement of frameworks like the Cyber Resilience Act in the EU, and the Cyber Trust Mark in the US.
Birkenes said: “With the addition of Memfault, Nordic can now offer OTA update management and delivery to all customers, building on any Nordic hardware, from nRF52, nRF53, nRF54, to nRF91 Series.”
Investing in technological development
Nordic is committed to continuous innovation that helps customers build reliable, secure, and scalable connected products.
In this regard Birkenes added: “Our investment in innovation and technology development you can say is focused on three areas:
- Deepening integration between Nordic solutions and the Memfault platform to give developers seamless observability and device management
- Collaborating with the Memfault team, which is now part of Nordic of course, to bring new features that address the challenges of low-power connected devices
- Ensuring the platform evolves alongside our roadmap so customers can benefit from the latest advances in hardware, software, tools, security and services”
Memfault will also continue to add new features and improvements for non-Nordic customers, delivering a market-leading service for developers on other silicon, Linux and Android. For example, Memfault will be releasing several new features designed to further improve debugging Linux devices.
Enabling its customers to innovate efficiently
With nRF Cloud, Nordic customers now get access to production-ready Cloud infrastructure from day one of development. This allows them to focus on developing innovative, reliable products, without the additional burden of designing and maintaining their own in-house cloud infrastructure to monitor and operate devices in production.
“nRF Cloud is optimised end-to-end for low-power devices. Today, Memfault’s Observability solution is deployed on everything from buoys in the ocean to water level sensors with 10+ year battery lifespans,” Birkenes noted.
Memfault has proven that collecting great data doesn’t have to impact battery life and in fact, customers use the data to make optimisations often resulting in significantly boosted battery life.
Birkenes said: “Getting access to great data is also not limited by connectivity constraints, be it low bandwidth, intermittent connectivity, or both. The observability data collected is buffered on the device when no connection is available and sent to the cloud automatically, once a connection is established.”
Developers also have complete control over the volume of data sent, able to configure packet sizes down to a few bytes, meaning low bandwidth doesn’t have to mean no visibility.
Considerations to keep in mind
The acquisition of Memfault further positions Nordic at the forefront of addressing emerging market needs as it will equip developers with the tools needed to meet evolving edge AI demands and security standards.
Birkenes added: “This marks a major leap in Nordic’s evolution – from hardware supplier to a trusted technology partner providing a complete platform to make development easier, faster, lower power, and more secure.”
In this way, Nordic becomes first semiconductor company to combine best-in-class hardware and embedded software, with a complete Cloud platform, transforming how connected products are built, deployed, and maintained.
“With Memfault’s observability and nRF Cloud’s management tools working together, engineering teams can monitor devices in the field, diagnose and resolve problems more efficiently, and push updates securely. The result: fewer headaches during debugging, higher product reliability, and long-term device security,” Birkenes concluded.
About the author:
Diego de Azcuénaga, Contributing Writer
