Cuddlefish Systems
N° 01  /  Cincinnati
The proposition

Ambient power RFID temperature sensing for cold-chain quality observation.

Battery-free tags read at every dock door, cold room, and truck threshold. A temperature record for every pallet — not just every truck.


§ 01  ·  The Gap

The missing tier of cold-chain observation.

Cold chain is observed at two tiers today. Manual logs and chart recorders are easy to skip, falsify, or backfill — they prove compliance on paper without preventing loss. Active data loggers cost fifty to several hundred dollars per node and run on batteries that die; their economics work for whole-truck or pharma shipments, not for every pallet.

Cuddlefish is the third tier: ambient-power tags at sub-dollar economics, dense enough to live on every pallet, every case, every monitored asset. Temperature data without batteries, without IT projects, without spreadsheets.

Manual logs
Cheap, unreliable
Active loggers
Reliable, expensive
Cuddlefish
Both, by design
§ 02  ·  Specification

What the tag actually is.

Passive UHF RFID with on-chip temperature sensing. No battery, no maintenance window, no per-device subscription. The radio field that reads the tag also powers it.

Power
None. Ambient — harvested from the reader field.
Unit cost
< $1.00 per tag, scaled to engagement.
Granularity
Pallet, case, or individual asset.
Deployment
Tags applied at source. Fixed readers at choke points. Handhelds for audit and receiving.
Records
Real-time portal, threshold alerts, compliance-ready exports.
Backend
Operational. The cloud pipeline is live — a cellular sibling device is currently streaming telemetry Portland → Cincinnati.
§ 03  ·  The Work

Built by people who've done this before.

Cuddlefish is the second RFID startup for this team. The first was at Kroger, in cold chain — the same problem, in the era before the unit economics worked. They do now.

Addison Carter
Sensor design & product

Twenty years across P&G, Kroger, Kao, and Yale. Materials, molecular biology, CPG, films, sensor networking, customer sensing.

Walt Moorehouse
Network & hardware integration

Twenty-five years across Kroger, AT&T, and Delta. Network architecture, hardware integration, telecom systems.

§ 04  ·  Contact

Conversations, not contact forms.

hello@cuddlefishsystems.com
Based in
Cincinnati, Ohio