Michaël Devid

Hardware founder · Netherlands

Ten years making connected hardware that ships.

I take connected products from a rough idea to certified mass production: electronics, firmware, app, cloud, and the factory line at the end of it. I lead the team, stay close to the bench, and don't stop until it works in the real world.

Michaël DevidFounder, Insyght · Co-founder, PadelPlay
Building since2016 Shipped to30+ countries Exits3 NowInsyght

How it started

origin

It started with video games. I built my own PCs just to run them, scavenged old parts from friends and family, and overclocked everything I could to squeeze out a few more frames. Getting Crysis to run was a personal mission.

That turned into building websites and running game-mod servers for other players. At some point I decided I wanted to build robots, so I went and studied electronic engineering. From there I fell into IoT, and took my first trip to Shenzhen to get a wearable into production.

The instinct never changed, just the stakes. Make the machine do more. I still care about the same things Dutch design cares about: make it functional, make it clean, and make it actually work.

The long build

2014 → now
Inspiro

Embedded Engineer

A remote control for Toyota's order pickers.

Toyota Material Handling needed an innovative remote control for their order-picker trucks to stay ahead of the competition. I rapid-prototyped one solution after another until we landed on the right form factor: a tiny, rugged industrial controller you could trust around heavy machinery.

Bluetooth 5 / BLE NFC Wireless charging Industrial & safe Ultra-compact
Shake-On

Lead Embedded Engineer

A bracelet that could feel a handshake.

My first wearable: a small BLE band that noticed when you shook someone's hand and quietly swapped contact details with their band. The hard part was the gesture detection, and this was before the AI tooling existed. I prototyped the model in MATLAB, converted it to rough C, and got it running on a tiny nRF52832. We shipped 9,000 units, and I learned supply chain the hard way through a lot of bad LiPo batteries. It's also where I learned that being on the factory floor, watching how things are actually made, changes everything.

nRF52832 Gesture ML on bare metal 9,000 units
Xeelas

Co-founder / CTO

Powering industrial sensors from sunlight.

I co-founded Xeelas with Dick Klaassen to bring IoT to heavy industry. We monitored diesel generators for Bredenoord and built solar-powered fuel-tank monitoring that ran with no power source of its own. The thing nobody else could do: with e-peas' first energy-harvesting chip, we made an ultra-low-power device that generated enough power to drive hungry 24V industrial sensors. I went back to Shenzhen in 2018 hunting for better batteries and switched us to LTO cells that charge well below freezing. I eventually sold my shares and moved on.

Energy harvesting (e-peas) LoRaWAN + cellular LTO batteries Exit · sold shares
Jogo → 433

Hardware Team Lead

We built a sensor for a football boot. Someone bought it.

I led hardware for an ultra-low-power sensor made to live inside a football shoe, small enough to disappear and tough enough to survive 90 minutes of getting kicked. Running IMU sensor fusion on a tiny chip under those G-forces was the Shake-On problem all over again, and the experience paid off. The work was good enough that 433 acquired the company and kept me on to run the team.

Sole-embedded sensor IMU + algorithms Acquired by 433
Viloc → Allsetra

CTO / Head of Technology

Getting stolen machines back to their owners.

I was asked to come in as CTO of Viloc, a Belgian startup, to create order and get their anti-theft tracker finished for mass production. I brought in Koos Habte, who I'd later start Insyght with. We got the ultra-small, ultra-low-power Viloc Tag onto the line, and it now sells in volume. Allsetra, then the largest distributor of the tag, acquired the company. The part I love: a 97% recovery rate, and the reaction of owners who get their stolen gear back. That's the kind of IoT that earns its keep, you don't just measure the problem, you actually solve it.

Ultra-small tracker 97% recovery rate Acquired by Allsetra
PadelPlay

Co-founder / Hardware

A wearable for the fastest-growing sport.

After the 433 acquisition, David and Jerry wanted to start something new, and we landed on PadelPlay: a sport on the rise with no wearable yet. Everything I'd learned about wearables fit perfectly. This time we stream the IMU data live over Bluetooth instead of processing it on the device, so we can run much heavier models in the cloud. Fitting it all into the enclosure is why the sensor has its odd shape. I'm proudest of how stable and robust the streaming holds up under real play. Today it's recorded over a million shots across 30+ countries and was named Start-Up of the Year at the Padel World Summit 2025.

Live BLE streaming 1M+ shots 30+ countries Start-Up of the Year '25
Insyght

Founder

The studio I always wished existed.

I started Insyght for a simple reason: I can't stop building hardware products, and this is the vehicle that makes that possible. I also wanted to build a place with good people and a culture I set myself. Most connected-hardware projects fall apart because the work is split across four vendors and nobody owns the result, so we do all of it under one roof: industrial design, electronics, firmware, app, cloud, and we stay with you to the factory floor. Tech is at a crossroads with AI, and we're trying to embrace it fully and shape the new way of working. We're eight people now, building for clients in tracking, wearables and industrial IoT, and shipping our own products too.

8 people Design → firmware → cloud → factory AI-native

Alongside all of it, Devid Creations has been the consulting thread since 2016 — strategy, scale-up and mass-production advice for hardware teams.

Things I've shipped

selected work
Michaël Devid probing the PadelPlay padel sensor circuit board on the bench

Sports wearable

PadelPlay sensor

A padel wearable that streams motion live over Bluetooth so the heavy analysis runs in the cloud. Every component packed into a deliberately odd shape so it disappears on the racket.

Shipped · 1M+ shots, 30+ countries

AuraSense solar-powered environmental sensor measuring noise and air quality

Environmental IoT

AuraSense

A solar-powered sensor that measures noise the way people actually experience it — loudness, sharpness, roughness — plus air quality, with AI identifying the source. Citizen-driven environmental data.

In pilot · own product

PCB layout of the dual-band LTE-M and NB-IoT antenna designed with AI tooling

RF · built with AI

AI-designed antenna

A dual-band LTE-M/NB-IoT antenna designed in three days using Claude, openEMS and Python instead of the usual six-week wait. I learned more about RF in those three days than in ten years of avoiding it.

Open-sourced · 21k impressions

Building in public

notes & AI workflows
RF · AI21k impressions

I AI-designed an LTE-M antenna in 3 days

openEMS for the electromagnetic sim, Python for the optimization, a desktop GUI to tweak it live, straight export to KiCad. The real unlock wasn't AI replacing the RF engineer — it was AI making the learning curve survivable.

Read on LinkedIn →
Hardware · behind the build

How we built AuraSense

From early sketches and sensor testing to the literal cracks in the process. Putting psychoacoustic metrics on an embedded target and making them run fast enough to be useful in the real world.

Read on LinkedIn →
Cloud

Cutting an Azure bill from €425 to €30

Direct-to-storage streaming, Azure Functions on free tiers, continuous monitoring. A 10x cut with less complexity, not more.

Read on LinkedIn →
AI · entrepreneurship

Vibe-coding my back office

A financial portal that scrapes invoices from suppliers who refuse to email them and matches everything to bank transactions. The barrier to automating the boring parts has never been lower.

Read on LinkedIn →

More AI-for-hardware workflows and tips land here as I build.

Questions people ask

the short answers

Who is Michaël Devid?

I'm a Dutch hardware founder. For ten years I've been building connected products and taking them from a rough prototype to certified mass production. I founded the IoT studio Insyght, co-founded the padel wearable company PadelPlay, and was part of three companies that were sold or acquired: Xeelas, Jogo (acquired by 433) and Viloc (acquired by Allsetra).

What kind of hardware do you build?

Battery-powered connected devices, mostly in three shapes: sports wearables, GPS and asset trackers, and industrial or environmental sensors. In practice that means electronics and PCB design, embedded firmware on low-power chips like the Nordic nRF52, Bluetooth Low Energy, LoRaWAN and cellular, enclosure and RF work, CE certification, and getting the design onto an actual factory line.

What is Insyght?

The studio I founded in 2024, based in Delft. Eight people doing industrial design, electronics, firmware, app and cloud under one roof, and staying involved to the factory floor. It exists because most connected-hardware projects don't fail on engineering, they fail because the work is split across four vendors and nobody owns the result.

Can I hire you to build a connected product?

Yes, through Insyght, which takes hardware projects from first concept to certified mass production. If you need advice rather than a full build, Devid Creations has been the consulting thread since 2016 for strategy, scale-up and mass production. The fastest way to start is a message on LinkedIn or an email to [email protected].

Where are you based?

The Netherlands. Insyght works from Delft, and I'm in Shenzhen regularly for production, sourcing and factory work. I work in Dutch and English.

What are you working on now?

Running Insyght and building client hardware in tracking, wearables and industrial IoT, plus our own products: AuraSense and the open-sourced LTE-M/NB-IoT antenna. And writing publicly about AI workflows for embedded, which is the part of this job that changed most in the last two years.

Let's talk

Building connected hardware? Let's talk.

Whether it's a sensor, a wearable, or a product you need taken from sketch to the factory floor — or you just want to trade notes on hardware and building in public.

LinkedIn ↗ [email protected] insyght.io ↗ GitHub ↗