Bob recently sat down with the RIoT team for their RAP Q&A Series to talk about the journey behind Cellio—where it started, how it’s evolved, and what it means to build something that truly helps people. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend checking it out: Fifteen Minutes with Cellio.
Reading Bob's reflection on the journey that led to Cellio really makes me reflect on far we’ve come—from two engineers trying to build a "people before profit" company, to launching a full-fledged IoT ecosystem that’s making real impact across industries.
When we first started Device Solutions, it was all about helping others bring their wireless ideas to life. We were proud of our work, but we saw the ceiling early on. We knew that if we wanted to build something scalable and lasting—something that could truly solve recurring problems—we had to think bigger than just individual devices. That’s how Cellio started: not as a product, but as a systems-level rethink. We weren’t just building hardware anymore; we were designing an infrastructure—an ecosystem—to bridge the physical and digital worlds.
From a technical standpoint, Cellio is built to be flexible, robust, and easy to deploy. It operates using sub-GHz wireless communication, which gives us significant advantages in range and penetration—particularly in environments like agricultural fields, metal-heavy manufacturing floors, or remote healthcare settings where Wi-Fi and cellular can struggle. We’ve engineered our transceivers to be ultra-low-power, so they can run for years on standard batteries, which is crucial when you're deploying devices in the field or in places that aren’t easily accessible.
On the hardware side, Cellio includes a mix of gateways, end nodes, and interface modules that support a variety of sensor types and are ruggedized for industrial and outdoor environments. We also support over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates, local edge processing, and BLE provisioning, which helps installers get up and running quickly without needing to crack open enclosures or carry laptops into the field.
We’ve also focused a lot of effort on making the backend integration seamless. Cellio is designed to securel send data to whatever cloud service or application the customer prefers. That flexibility is intentional—we didn’t want to force people into our own platform. Instead, we act as a trusted pipe between the sensors in the field and the tools customers already rely on for visualization, alerting, or analytics. We also support buffering and store-and-forward, so even in the case of network outages, data isn't lost.
Because of all that, Cellio can adapt across verticals. It’s been used to monitor grain silos and animal feed systems, to help utilities track water usage and flow rates, and—one of the more meaningful applications for me personally—to support wearable medical devices that deliver near real-time cardiac data to physicians. When you're building something that touches lives in that way, you feel the weight of it, and the responsibility to get it right.
What’s always stood out about working with Bob is that, even through all the pivots and prototypes, the heart of the company never changed. People first. That’s what we built Cellio on—people, trust, and the belief that good engineering, when done with purpose, can change lives.
If you're interested in learning more about Cellio, check out our IoT Products page.