Wiliot: How Ambient IoT and Physical AI Are Rewiring the Supply Chain

Wiliot

Key Takeaways

  • Wiliot is a private, Israel- and San Diego-based company that makes battery-free Bluetooth sensors called IoT Pixels, plus the cloud platform that turns their signals into supply-chain intelligence. It is not publicly traded and has no stock ticker.
  • The core innovation is energy harvesting, not the chip itself. IoT Pixels have no battery — they power themselves by harvesting ambient radio-frequency energy, which is what makes item-level tagging at “pennies per tag” economically realistic.
  • Wiliot’s biggest deployment to date is with Walmart, which is rolling out roughly 90 million IoT Pixels across 4,600 U.S. stores and more than 40 distribution centers by the end of 2026 to enhance scan-free visibility.
  • Wiliot frames its technology as complementary to, not a wholesale replacement for, RFID and barcodes — RFID still wins on raw read speed for high-volume snapshot counts, while Wiliot’s pitch is continuous, always-on visibility rather than point-in-time scans.
  • The company raised roughly $270 million through 2021 to further develop its IoT tags and enhance ROI for its partners. and added a further $75 million strategic investment from Avery Dennison in April 2026, which brings Avery Dennison onto Wiliot’s board. Total lifetime funding is reported at $364 million by some data providers, though the precise figure varies slightly by source and not every round’s size is fully disclosed.
  • “Wiliot stock” is a real search term with no real product behind it yet — the company has not filed for an IPO, and shares are only accessible to accredited investors through private secondary marketplaces, at their own risk and pricing.

Wiliot at a Glance

Category Details
Company name Wiliot Ltd.
Founded 2017
Founders Tal Tamir (CEO), Yaron Elboim (COO), Alon Yehezkely (CTO)
Headquarters Caesarea, Israel, with U.S. operations based in San Diego, California
Company type Private
Core technology Ambient IoT — battery-free, energy-harvesting Bluetooth sensors (“IoT Pixels”) plus a cloud-based AI/ML platform
Flagship product Wiliot Gen3 IoT Pixel (launched January 2026)
Employees Reported at roughly 260–265 as of mid-2026 (third-party data provider estimate, not a company-disclosed figure)
Total funding raised Approximately $270 million through 2021, plus a $75 million strategic round in April 2026; some data providers place lifetime totals as high as $364 million
The key investors are essential for the development of technologies which make the supply chain more transparent Avery Dennison, Amazon Web Services, Samsung Venture Investment Corp., SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Qualcomm Ventures, Maersk Growth, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Verizon Ventures, M Ventures, 83North, Norwest Venture Partners, among others
Stock status Private; not listed on Nasdaq, NYSE, or any public exchange; no ticker symbol
Major customers/partners named publicly Walmart, AT&T, Avery Dennison, Royal Mail
Applications Inventory intelligence, automated receiving, reusable asset tracking, automated shipment verification, temperature/cold-chain monitoring

What Is the Wiliot Company?

Wiliot is the provider of the technology which enables physical objects to track and communicate their whereabouts and conditions continuously without being scanned. Wiliot has been established in 2017 by three engineers with experience in semiconductors Tal Tamir, Yaron Elboim, and Alon Yehezkely after their previous venture Wilocity of building wireless chip company which was acquired by Qualcomm in 2014. This experience played an important role in Wiliot’s venture: Wiliot’s technology is not about the supply chain software but about fitting a computer, sensor, and a radio into a device as small as a stamp and at a price affordable enough for attaching to a pallet, crate, or even a single product.

Its own definition of its function has changed somewhat over the years to become more concerned with automation and real-time visibility. At first, Wiliot positioned itself mainly as a company that pioneered the Internet of Things but at some point as a “Sensing as a Service” company and has gone to concentrate on ambient radio and workflow improvement. More recently, it has gone to position itself around two related concepts – Ambient IoT (the sensing layer) and Physical AI (the larger concept of AI systems that operate on continuous real-world data, not periodic snapshots). Wiliot positions itself as a global leader in Physical AI for supply chains. Its own literature outlines the connection between these: “Ambient IoT collects massive amounts of data about trillions of objects that we use daily. And only AI can understand it all.”

This characterization is an assertion made by the company regarding its own status and not an objective ranking within the marketplace — there is no independent verification of the fact that Wiliot leads in such a nascent and undefined category. However, this is a fairly apt characterization of the actual hardware and software systems built by the company: tags which sense things, network to carry signals from those tags, and cloud software to process all of that data into actionable insight.

How Wiliot IoT Pixels Work

The mechanics are worth walking through in order, because “battery-free Bluetooth sensor” compresses several distinct pieces of engineering into three words.

Physical object → IoT Pixel → energy harvesting → sensing → Bluetooth broadcast → Network Infrastructure → Wiliot Cloud → AI/ML → operational decision.

What Is a Wiliot IoT Pixel?

A Wiliot IoT Pixel is a self-powered, sticker-sized computing device — Postage stamp-sized compute devices that power themselves without batteries and by harvesting radio waves are examples of battery-free IoT technology. — that attaches to a pallet, case, tote, or product and continuously reports data such as location, temperature, humidity, light exposure, and movement. It functions as a tiny system-on-chip: a processor, sensors, and a radio, printed onto a thin, flexible substrate rather than assembled onto a rigid circuit board.

How Does a Wiliot Bluetooth Tag Work?

The Pixel broadcasts standard Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals — no proprietary reader hardware is required. 128-bit AES encryption, Hardware True Random Generator protects the data in transit, and any Bluetooth 4.0-or-newer device configured to listen for the broadcast — a smartphone, a router, a purpose-built gateway — can pick up the signal and relay it onward. That’s a meaningfully different architecture from RFID, which typically needs dedicated readers positioned at fixed checkpoints.

How Does Battery-Free Energy Harvesting Work?

This is the part that makes the whole system economically viable at scale. Rather than carrying a battery, the Pixel harvests small amounts of radio-frequency energy from the ambient environment — nearby Bluetooth devices, Wi-Fi routers, cellular infrastructure, or purpose-built “energizing” devices — and uses that harvested energy to power its sensors and broadcast a signal. The Gen3 version of the Pixel has two harvesting antennas tuned for different ranges: a Sub-1 GHz antenna for long-range energizing up to 40 meters, and a 2.4 GHz antenna for close-range energizing up to 3 meters. In principle, a tag built this way has no fixed lifespan tied to battery depletion — its functional life is limited by the durability of the physical tag itself, not a power source that eventually runs out.

The trade-off, and it’s a real one, is that energy-harvesting devices operate on a genuinely constrained energy budget. They can’t broadcast continuously at high frequency the way a battery-powered beacon could; they sense and transmit within whatever power the environment happens to make available at a given moment.

What Data Can Wiliot IoT Pixels Capture?

Depending on the Pixel generation and configuration, the sensors can report location (inferred from signal strength and reader proximity, not GPS), temperature, humidity, light exposure, and motion. The Gen3 Pixel specifically supports location, temperature, humidity, and light sensing, which is enough to cover the most common supply-chain use cases: knowing where something is, whether it stayed within a safe temperature range, and whether a sealed container was opened in transit.

What Is Wiliot Network Infrastructure?

Wiliot’s “Network Infrastructure” is the layer of connectivity connecting Pixels to the cloud. This layer of connectivity performs two functions at once: energizing the tagless devices and collecting the information sent by them thanks to battery-less IoT pixels. According to Wiliot’s description, ready-made bridges and gateways (hubs), fast to install, wake up nearby IoT Pixels via radio, collect their information, and securely forward it to the Wiliot Cloud. Notably, this network infrastructure does not need to be created from scratch like the one required for early RFID technologies. Since the tags utilize standard Bluetooth technology, regular cell phones, routers, and access points may become a part of this network, while telecom operators can extend it even more, as demonstrated by the collaboration between Wiliot and AT&T up to 2026 described below.

What Happens to the Data?

Once a reading reaches the Wiliot Cloud, it’s processed by machine learning and AI models built specifically for interpreting physical-world sensor streams — not general-purpose language models repurposed for the job. The platform looks for patterns: a pallet that hasn’t moved when it should have, a temperature excursion on a refrigerated shipment, a case that shows up at the wrong dock. Those patterns get surfaced as alerts, dashboards, or automated workflow triggers that integrate into a customer’s existing warehouse management or ERP systems, rather than requiring operators to check a separate Wiliot-branded interface all day.

Wiliot Gen3 IoT Pixel

Wiliot introduced the Gen3 IoT Pixel on January 8, 2026, describing it as the newest generation of its battery-free sensing technology. It’s worth being precise about what changed, because Wiliot has iterated through several hardware generations since 2017, and older press coverage referencing the “Version 2” or “Battery-Assisted” Pixel reflects earlier product lines that are no longer the company’s current flagship offering.

The headline engineering change in Gen3 is a shift in the tag’s material stack. According to Wiliot Vice President Amir Khoshniyati, speaking to Fierce Sensors, the Gen 3 IoT Pixel uses an aluminum-based inlay in place of the copper used in earlier generations — a change the company says improved harvesting efficiency while lowering material cost. Combined with dual-band harvesting antennas and Bluetooth Low Energy 5.2 support, Wiliot describes the result as unit costs driving unit costs down to around ten cents per tag, a key threshold for large-scale pallet and case-level deployments, while leveraging energy from ambient radio., according to company statements.

Wiliot offers Gen3 in two physical formats. Consumable tags are typically applied as converted labels during pallet build and shrink-wrapping, particularly in high-volume retail and grocery flows, while durable versions are ruggedized for reuse and are designed for assets such as roll cages, totes, and reusable containers operating in harsh warehouse conditions. That durable-format distinction matters in practice: Royal Mail has reportedly kept durable Wiliot tags running on roll cages for multiple years using the same hardware, provided the tags are positioned carefully to avoid metal interference and physical strike zones — a real-world data point on longevity that goes beyond marketing copy.

Wiliot Physical AI Platform

Wiliot’s software layer — variously branded as the Wiliot Intelligence Platform or the Wiliot Physical AI Platform across different company materials — is where raw sensor readings get converted into something a business can act on. The company’s own positioning is direct about the relationship between the hardware and the software: according to Wiliot Vice President Amir Khoshniyati, the IoT Pixel is “just an enabler… it starts off the data flow. But really, we are a platform company.”

The platform’s job spans several layers: ingesting billions of individual sensing events, filtering out noise (a tag that briefly loses signal isn’t necessarily a lost pallet), detecting anomalies against expected patterns, and triggering the right kind of alert or automated workflow for a given customer’s operations. Wiliot’s own materials describe the scale involved: the company says its platform processes billions of sensing events across millions of products every month and that it integrates seamlessly into existing enterprise systems, enabling businesses to automate workflows rather than requiring a standalone dashboard nobody actually checks. One executive described a conversational query layer built on top of this data: users can, in the company’s words, transform their interactions with real-time supply chain intelligence. ask it questions very much like you would ChatGPT, and it can identify misplaced packages, items that need refrigeration, or assets that went down the wrong path.

None of this is independently benchmarked in public — figures like “billions of sensing events” come from the company itself, and readers evaluating Wiliot for a real deployment should ask for platform-specific, verifiable metrics relevant to their own use case rather than taking headline numbers as a substitute for due diligence.

Wiliot and Supply Chain Management

Wiliot organizes its product around five core, named solution areas that customers can deploy individually or together: Inventory Intelligence, Automated Receiving, Reusable Asset Tracking, Automated Shipment Verification, and Temperature Monitoring. In practice, these map onto a few recurring supply-chain pain points.

Inventory visibility is the broadest use case: knowing what’s actually in a warehouse or on a truck, in near real time, rather than relying on the last manual cycle count. Automated receiving targets the labor-intensive, error-prone process of checking incoming shipments against purchase orders — a task Wiliot pitches as something continuous sensing can largely automate rather than requiring a person with a scanner. Reusable asset tracking applies to things like roll cages, totes, and pallets that circulate repeatedly through a network and are expensive to lose track of — this is the Royal Mail use case, applied to nearly a million mail containers. Automated shipment verification aims to catch mis-shipments (wrong pallet, wrong dock, wrong truck) before they become a customer complaint. Temperature and condition monitoring addresses cold-chain compliance for perishable food and pharmaceuticals, where a battery-free sensor’s theoretically unlimited lifespan is a genuine advantage over battery-powered loggers that can fail mid-shipment.

The company also positions its technology around digital product passports — the emerging regulatory requirement, driven primarily by EU legislation on textiles, batteries, and electronics, for products to carry verifiable, standardized data about their origin, materials, and sustainability credentials throughout their lifecycle. Ambient IoT’s continuous, item-level data trail is a plausible technical fit for that requirement, though digital product passport mandates are still being phased in and Wiliot’s specific commercial traction in that particular category isn’t independently quantified in public sources.

It’s worth being direct about the limits of what’s publicly documented here. Wiliot names four organizations publicly and in detail — Walmart, AT&T, Avery Dennison, and Royal Mail — and says more broadly that it currently works with the majority of Fortune 50 companies that have active supply chain initiatives, with deployments across tens of thousands of sites and… approaching hundreds of millions of actively tracked assets, improving item location and condition monitoring.. That’s a company claim, not an independently audited customer count, and readers should treat it accordingly: plausible given the scale of the Walmart rollout alone, but not something a third party has verified line by line.

Wiliot and AI in Supply Chain

PHYSICAL WORLD → CONTINUOUS DATA → AI → PREDICTION → DECISION → ACTION.

The core argument Wiliot and its partners make — and it’s a reasonable one on its own logical terms, independent of whether Wiliot specifically is the company that best executes it — is that AI models are only as useful as the data feeding them, and most supply-chain data today is sparse and delayed. A barcode scan happens once, at a checkpoint, which can be enhanced by ambient IoT technology for improved efficiency. An ERP record updates on a schedule, not continuously. An AI model trained to predict a stockout or a shipment delay from that kind of data is working from snapshots, not a continuous feed.

Ambient IoT changes what data is available to feed those models: instead of a handful of scan events per shipment, a continuously reporting sensor can provide a much denser stream of location and condition data across the same journey. Whether AI models can actually make productive use of an order of magnitude more physical-world data — and whether the marginal value of that extra data justifies its cost — is a genuinely open, contested question in the broader AI and IoT industry, not something Wiliot has settled on its own.

The AT&T collaboration, expanded in May 2026, is a concrete illustration of how this is supposed to work end to end. AT&T frames its role plainly: AT&T is contributing network infrastructure, cellular connectivity, and field execution — enabling these networks to be deployed at scale, while Wiliot’s Physical AI platform provides the sensing and intelligence layer. Reported results from that collaboration — again, company-and-partner-reported figures rather than independently audited outcomes — include inventory accuracy to 99% or more; reduced dock-to-stock time from 24-48 hours to 2-6 hours; reduced receiving labor by 30-50%; reduced mis-shipments by up to 90%; and reduced lost, damaged, and delayed packages by 60%. Those are the kinds of numbers that belong in a serious evaluation of Wiliot’s technology — but they’re also exactly the kind of figures a buyer should ask to see replicated in their own environment before assuming they’ll transfer directly.

Wiliot vs. RFID vs. Barcodes vs. Conventional Bluetooth

Wiliot is careful — at least in its own published material — not to claim its technology simply replaces RFID outright, and independent industry coverage broadly agrees the two technologies serve different jobs well. The clearest framing comes from a piece co-authored by Wiliot’s own CEO and an Avery Dennison executive in RFID Journal, an independent industry publication, which argues RFID and Ambient IoT can be used independently and in tandem to make lives a little easier, more efficient, and a whole lot more exciting — a notably measured framing from the company itself, given how easy it would be to oversell a “replacement” narrative.

Dimension Barcodes Passive RFID Wiliot Ambient IoT (IoT Pixels)
Power source None (printed) None (passive tag) None — harvests ambient RF energy
Read method Line-of-sight manual scan Fixed-point reader, no line-of-sight needed Passive, continuous — no active scanning step
Visibility type Point-in-time snapshot Point-in-time snapshot at read zones Continuous, ongoing
Native sensing (temperature, humidity, etc.) None It may be limited without extra battery/electronic components that may hamper the performance of the sensor tags Built in (Gen3: temperature, humidity, light, location)
Typical infrastructure Handheld or fixed scanners Dedicated RFID readers and antennas Standard Bluetooth-enabled devices; existing smartphones/routers/gateways can participate
Reported per-unit cost Fractions of a cent (printed) As low as sub-5-cent tags in volume, per industry sources Approaching roughly $0.10 per Gen3 tag at scale, per company statements
Strongest use case for Wiliot’s technology is in the cold chain, where real-time visibility can drastically reduce waste High-volume, low-cost identification Rapid bulk inventory counts at fixed checkpoints Ongoing condition and location tracking between checkpoints
Key limitation No condition data; requires manual scan Snapshot only; limited native sensing without extra hardware Constrained energy budget; requires RF-rich environment and thoughtful tag placement near metal

An independent-leaning comparison published by Wiliot itself summarizes the trade-off this way: balancing energy efficiency with the need for actionable insights from real-time data. For rapid, high-volume inventory tracking – in environments like retail floors, stockrooms, and distribution centers – passive RFID remains the fastest when it comes to readability at the item level. It delivers lightning-fast reads and frictionless counts, often with sub-5 cent tags. The company’s pitch for its own alternative is essentially about what happens between those checkpoint reads: RFID gives you a snapshot. Wiliot gives you a story.

That’s a fair characterization of the general technical trade-off — continuous sensing versus fast bulk reads — even allowing for the fact that it’s coming from a company with an obvious interest in making its own approach sound compelling.

Wiliot Price: How Much Does a Wiliot Tag Cost?

This is one of the most frequently searched Wiliot-related queries, and it deserves a precise answer rather than a marketing slogan.

Wiliot does not publish a single, fixed retail price for its IoT Pixels, and the company’s business model is part of the reason why: Wiliot’s assembly and conversion partners buy wafers (chips) from Wiliot and sell finished tags, and therefor set the price of Wiliot IoT Pixels. While Wiliot owns the design and sells the silicon chips that are embedded into IoT Pixels, our partners with world-class inlay assemblers and converters sell them. Wiliot itself doesn’t set the shelf price a customer pays for a finished tag — its manufacturing and conversion partners do, which means actual pricing varies by order volume, tag format, and converter.

What is publicly documented:

  • Early starter kits were priced at $500, including a small number of sample Pixels, bridge devices, and a limited cloud subscription — useful context for hobbyist or evaluation-scale interest, not representative of enterprise deployment cost.
  • The company’s long-standing marketing language is “pennies per tag” at volume, a claim repeated consistently across years of company materials but historically difficult to verify precisely; one 2022 industry report on the earlier Version 2 Pixel noted a Wiliot executive suggesting the real-world cost at that time was probably somewhere near a dollar rather than literal pennies, illustrating the gap that can exist between a company’s aspirational pricing language and where costs actually land at a given point in a product’s maturity.
  • The Battery-Assisted IoT Pixel (an earlier, separate product line from the current battery-free flagship) was announced with a specific published ceiling: it will sell below $2.
  • The current Gen3 IoT Pixel is reported, according to company statements, at unit costs driving unit costs down to around ten cents per tag for large-scale pallet and case-level deployments — the most specific, recent figure available, though it is a company-reported target rather than an independently audited average selling price.

Beyond the tag itself, a real deployment also involves infrastructure costs (bridges, gateways, or carrier-network integration such as the AT&T collaboration), platform/software subscription costs, and integration labor to connect Wiliot’s data into a customer’s existing WMS or ERP systems. None of those additional costs are published in standardized, publicly available pricing tables — they are negotiated per deployment, which is typical for enterprise IoT and software contracts at this scale, but means any total cost-of-ownership figure a prospective customer sees should come directly from Wiliot’s sales process rather than from public sources like this one.

Wiliot Stock: Price, Symbol and Investment Reality

Given how often “Wiliot stock” and “Wiliot stock price” are searched, it’s worth answering this section as directly as the underlying facts allow — and being clear that no legitimate source can offer more precision than what follows, because the underlying reality is genuinely simple.

Is Wiliot publicly traded?

No. Wiliot is a privately held company. It has never completed an initial public offering, and as of publication, it has not filed for one.

What Is the Wiliot Stock Symbol?

There isn’t one. Wiliot does not have an official ticker symbol because this company is not currently publicly traded.

What Is the Wiliot Stock Price?

There is no public stock price, because there is no public stock. Private-market data providers such as Forge Global and Hiive track indicative pricing for shares that trade in secondary, accredited-investor-only markets, based on information like the company’s most recent primary funding-round valuation — but that is fundamentally different from a listed share price you’d see quoted on an exchange, and it isn’t something available to ordinary retail investors.

Can You Buy Wiliot Stock?

Not from a regular stock broker’s account, but via IoT solutions in inventory management. Wiliot stocks, under specific conditions, may be traded on secondary marketplaces for accredited investors such as Forge Global, Hiive, and EquityZen (all of which mention Wiliot in this context) but will rely upon an existing shareholder (usually, one of the early employees) willing to sell the shares, will be contingent upon company rules on transfer of stock, and will be fraught with typical dangers of unregulated private market investment. This is not an investment recommendation, and any person interested in this kind of transaction should seek independent verification of the conditions and prices elsewhere.

Is Wiliot Listed on Nasdaq?

No.

Is Wiliot Listed on NYSE?

No.

How Is Wiliot Financed?

Through venture capital and corporate strategic investment rounds. See the funding section below for the full history as publicly reported.

Wiliot Funding, Investors and Company Growth

Wiliot’s funding history, reconstructed from company announcements and financial-data providers, looks like this:

Round Approximate date Amount Lead / notable investors
Series A 2017 Not fully disclosed Qualcomm Ventures, M Ventures, and other key investors are focusing on innovations in ai-ready data that drives roi.
Series B (with extension) 2019–2020 Brought cumulative total to roughly $70 million Verizon Ventures and others joined an extension of the B round
Series C July 2021 $200 million Led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2; brought cumulative total to approximately $270 million
Corporate/strategic minority round April 27, 2026 $75 million Avery Dennison Corporation (NYSE: AVY)

That table reflects the figures that are consistently corroborated across multiple independent sources: the Series C financing brings the total raised by the company to $270 million As of 2021, and Avery Dennison’s own press release confirms the integration of purpose-built AI and ML models in their supply chain processes. a $75 million minority investment in Wiliot announced April 27, 2026. Adding those two figures together gives approximately $345 million in disclosed funding. Third-party company-data aggregators such as Tracxn and PitchBook report a somewhat higher lifetime total of $364 million across a reported six rounds, which likely reflects additional smaller or partially undisclosed financing events between the major rounds listed above. Where sources disagree on an exact figure and neither is clearly more authoritative, the honest answer is that the precise lifetime total isn’t fully and consistently disclosed — a reader who needs the exact number for a specific purpose should treat $345–364 million as the reasonably well-supported range rather than either bound as a certainty.

Wiliot’s investor base spans a mix of financial and strategic backers, several of whom are also operational partners: 83North, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), Avery Dennison, Grove Ventures, M Ventures, the corporate VC of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, Maersk Growth, Norwest Venture Partners, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures LLC, Samsung Venture Investment Corp., Vintage Investment Partners, and Verizon Ventures, alongside SoftBank Vision Fund 2 as the Series C lead. The April 2026 round carries a specific and unusual structural detail: a focus on integrating digital and physical worlds in enterprise supply chains. the company has issued convertible preferred shares in the transaction. As part of the transaction, Avery Dennison Corporation will join the board of directors of the company — a governance change that goes beyond a typical passive financial investment and reflects how central the Avery Dennison manufacturing relationship has become to Wiliot’s ability to actually produce tags at scale.

One figure worth flagging honestly: at least one data provider’s historical record shows a January 2019 valuation of roughly $120 million, and industry reporting around the 2021 Series C suggested a valuation in the neighborhood of $1 billion at that time, though Wiliot did not officially disclose that figure, impacting the perception of its market position in the realm of actionable ai-ready data that drives roi. No reliable, disclosed valuation figure exists for the company as of the April 2026 round — readers searching for a current Wiliot valuation should treat any number they encounter with real skepticism unless it traces to a primary source.

Wiliot Partnerships

Four relationships stand out as the most substantively documented in independent reporting, beyond Wiliot’s own press materials.

Walmart represents Wiliot’s largest publicly disclosed deployment by a wide margin. Announced in October 2025 and expanding through 2026, the collaboration involves rolling out roughly 90 million IoT Pixels across Walmart’s U.S. footprint — covering 4,600 Walmart Supercenters, Neighborhood Markets and over 40 distribution centers — with data feeding directly into Walmart’s own AI systems for inventory accuracy and cold-chain compliance. Walmart’s own senior vice president of transformation and innovation, Greg Cathey, described the goal in terms of a long-standing retail problem: reducing waste through automation and improved inventory management with IoT tags. “we’re also tackling one of the hardest problems in retail – knowing exactly what we own and where it is at any given moment.”

AT&T became a network-infrastructure partner in an arrangement formalized and expanded in May 2026, under which AT&T brings network infrastructure and field execution while Wiliot supplies the sensing and AI layer. The relationship shifted, per both companies’ statements, toward a systems integration and device certification model – positioning AT&T to deploy, manage, and support the future commercialization of Wiliot-powered data services, including work toward certifying Wiliot-ecosystem gateway devices to run natively on AT&T’s network.

Avery Dennison, the NYSE-listed labeling and materials-science company, has been a Wiliot partner since at least 2022 and deepened that relationship substantially in April 2026 through its $75 million strategic investment and board seat. Avery Dennison’s specific role is manufacturing and go-to-market: Wiliot CEO Tal Tamir described the company as “the premier partner in the design, manufacturing and go-to-market capabilities for Wiliot at the scale required to realize accelerating demand.” Avery Dennison brings decades of experience turning RFID and labeling technology into mass-manufacturable products — exactly the kind of scaling expertise a chip-design company like Wiliot doesn’t have in-house.

Royal Mail, the UK postal and delivery service, became the world’s first delivery company to use tech innovator Wiliot’s digital tags, deploying durable Wiliot tags on nearly one million mail containers to track their real-time location and reduce loss — a use case Wiliot also frames as relevant to future digital product passport requirements, since the same tracking infrastructure can capture provenance and lifecycle data over time.

Beyond these four, Wiliot is also a founding member of the Ambient IoT Alliance, which focuses on integrating sensor signals for improved cold chain logistics., a cross-industry group formed in early 2025 alongside Atmosic, Infineon, Intel, PepsiCo, Qualcomm, and VusionGroup, dedicated to facilitating a global ecosystem based on next-generation, battery-free ambient Internet of Things standards for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 5G. That standards work connects to genuinely independent, non-Wiliot-controlled bodies: ambient IoT capabilities are being formally defined within 3GPP, Bluetooth SIG, and IEEE standards processes, with 3GPP specifically working ambient IoT into upcoming 5G Advanced releases. That standards involvement matters for a practical reason: it suggests Wiliot’s underlying approach is more likely to remain interoperable with future wireless infrastructure than if it were relying purely on a closed, proprietary protocol.

Advantages of Wiliot

Based on the available evidence, several genuine technical and commercial advantages stand out:

  • No battery maintenance burden. Because IoT Pixels harvest ambient energy rather than relying on a battery, they avoid the recurring replacement and disposal costs that limit battery-powered sensor deployments at scale — a meaningful advantage for tracking assets that stay in circulation for years, like reusable containers.
  • Standard-protocol compatibility. By broadcasting over standard Bluetooth Low Energy rather than a proprietary radio protocol, Wiliot Pixels can, in principle, be read by widely available infrastructure (smartphones, routers, existing access points) rather than requiring an entirely new, dedicated reader network — lowering the infrastructure barrier to a pilot deployment compared with some earlier-generation IoT hardware.
  • Continuous rather than point-in-time visibility. For use cases where knowing an item’s condition between checkpoints genuinely matters — cold-chain compliance, high-value reusable assets, in-transit condition monitoring — continuous sensing offers a category of insight that periodic barcode or RFID scans structurally cannot.
  • A credible manufacturing and distribution partner. The Avery Dennison relationship gives Wiliot access to established, high-volume label and tag manufacturing infrastructure, which is historically one of the harder problems for hardware startups to solve on their own.
  • Demonstrated ability to execute at genuine retail scale. The Walmart deployment, whatever one makes of the company’s other claims, is a real, named, verifiable commercial engagement at a scale — tens of millions of tags across thousands of physical locations — that few competing ambient IoT vendors have publicly matched.

Limitations and Challenges

A fair accounting also has to include where the technology and the company face real constraints.

Energy-harvesting devices operate on a genuinely limited power budget. As Wiliot’s own educational content acknowledges, Devices must be designed to operate within a limited energy budget, which can affect how often they transmit data or perform sensing operations. Organizations deploying Ambient IoT must ensure adequate sources of RF energy or other ambient power are present in the environment. In practice, that means deployment environments without sufficient ambient RF activity — or with significant physical obstruction — may see reduced read reliability compared with a marketing pitch built around ideal-condition performance.

Metal interference and tag placement require real engineering care to ensure optimal performance of battery-free IoT tags., not just sticking a tag anywhere convenient. Documented field experience from the Royal Mail deployment indicates tags on metal roll cages needed to be positioned on protected placards and bound at the corners of the asset to avoid strike zones and metal interference to hold up over multi-year use — a reasonable, solvable engineering constraint, but one that means deployments require thoughtful physical installation planning rather than a purely plug-and-play rollout.

RFID retains a genuine speed advantage for certain use cases. By Wiliot’s own published comparison, passive RFID remains faster for rapid, bulk item-level counts at fixed checkpoints — a use case Wiliot doesn’t claim to beat, choosing instead to position its technology as complementary rather than a universal replacement.

Pricing precision is genuinely difficult for outside buyers to obtain. Because Wiliot doesn’t set final tag prices itself — its manufacturing partners do — and because company-published “pennies per tag” language has, at points in the product’s history, run ahead of documented real-world pricing, prospective customers should treat published cost figures as directional targets rather than binding quotes, and should request current, deployment-specific pricing directly.

Most quantitative performance claims come from the company and its partners, not independent audits. Figures like 99% inventory accuracy, 90% mis-shipment reduction, or “billions of sensing events” monthly are consistently repeated across Wiliot’s own press materials and its partners’ statements, but this article was unable to identify a fully independent, third-party audit validating those figures across Wiliot’s full customer base. That doesn’t mean the numbers are wrong — they’re specific and consistent enough to be plausible — but a prospective enterprise buyer evaluating Wiliot seriously should ask for verifiable, comparable metrics from their own pilot deployment rather than assuming headline figures will transfer directly to their operation.

As a private company, Wiliot’s own financial health is not independently auditable by the public. Revenue figures are not disclosed in the sources reviewed for this article; funding totals vary slightly by source; and, like any venture-backed private company at this stage, Wiliot’s long-term viability depends on continued access to capital and successful execution of large-scale rollouts like the Walmart deployment, which represents significant unrealized commercial risk and reward simultaneously.

Who Could Benefit From Wiliot?

Based on the customer relationships and use cases Wiliot has publicly documented, the clearest fit profiles are:

  • Large-scale retail and grocery operators managing high SKU counts across many physical locations, where continuous inventory visibility can meaningfully reduce manual cycle-counting labor and out-of-stock incidents — the Walmart use case being the clearest evidence point.
  • Cold-chain and perishable-goods logistics operators, including food distributors and pharmaceutical supply chains, where continuous temperature monitoring offers regulatory compliance value (such as FSMA 204 traceability requirements in the United States) beyond what periodic checks can provide.
  • Postal, parcel, and reusable-asset-heavy logistics networks, following the Royal Mail model, where tracking a large pool of circulating, reusable containers or vehicles justifies durable, long-lived tags over disposable ones.
  • Organizations preparing for digital product passport requirements, particularly apparel, textile, battery, and electronics companies with EU market exposure, given the phased rollout of EU Digital Product Passport mandates beginning around 2027 for certain product categories.
  • Enterprises already standardized on major telecom or labeling infrastructure partners — specifically AT&T or Avery Dennison customers — who may find integration comparatively smoother given those companies’ direct, formalized roles in Wiliot’s deployment ecosystem.

Organizations with limited RF-rich infrastructure, very low-margin, low-value inventory where even ten-cent-per-tag economics don’t pencil out, or use cases genuinely better served by fast bulk-scan RFID rather than continuous monitoring are likely poorer fits, based on the trade-offs documented above.

The Future of Wiliot, Ambient IoT and Physical AI

Things that can be said to be objectively moving, at least until mid-2026: the Walmart launch proceeding to reach the 90 million Pixel and 4,600 site goal by year end; the AT&T partnership progressing from piloting integrated systems to commercializing network service; continued standards development activity by 3GPP, Bluetooth SIG, and IEEE which could potentially turn ambient IoT into a native feature of cellular and Wi-Fi infrastructure versus a bolt-on that requires special Wiliot gateways; and the board seat of Avery Dennison pointing to a long-term manufacturing relationship versus a single transaction.

Industry conclusions that seem reasonable but are not yet certain: assuming that the 5G Advanced effort by 3GPP is successful in standardizing ambient IoT device types at the network layer, then the practical infrastructure issue in rolling out technology like that offered by Wiliot would decline significantly because of telecom-grade infrastructure that would intrinsically provide the ability to power and communicate with energy-harvesting/battery-free devices. This would be a true tailwind for the whole segment of the market, including Wiliot’s direct and indirect competitors.

These are all purely speculative matters, and are so clearly labeled: whether or not Wiliot opts to go public, raise another major private funding round, or be acquired; its true valuation right now; whether or not the relationship between Wiliot and Walmart or AT&T will continue beyond what is currently known or expand into other areas; and whether “Physical AI,” as a category, receives industry-wide recognition that would justify Wiliot’s initial emphasis on it. All of this cannot reasonably be predicted by this article or any other publicly accessible resource at this point in time.

FAQ

What is Wiliot? Wiliot is a private technology company, founded in 2017 and headquartered in Caesarea, Israel with major U.S. operations in San Diego, California, that makes battery-free Bluetooth sensors called IoT Pixels and the cloud-based AI platform that processes the data they generate for supply-chain and asset-tracking applications.

What does Wiliot do? Wiliot sells sensing hardware and software that give physical objects — pallets, cases, reusable containers, and increasingly individual products — the ability to continuously report their location and condition to a cloud platform, which then uses AI and machine learning to detect patterns like misplaced inventory, temperature excursions, or shipment errors.

Is Wiliot publicly traded, and what is its stock symbol? No. Wiliot is a private company with no public stock ticker, and its shares are not listed on Nasdaq, NYSE, or any public exchange. It has not filed for an IPO as of publication.

How much does a Wiliot IoT Pixel cost? Wiliot doesn’t set the final retail price itself — that’s set by its manufacturing and conversion partners — but the company’s most recent published figure for its current Gen3 IoT Pixel is unit costs approaching around ten cents per tag at large-scale deployment volumes, according to company statements; actual pricing for a specific deployment should be confirmed directly with Wiliot or its partners.

Is Wiliot’s IoT Pixel really battery-free? Yes. The Pixel powers itself by harvesting ambient radio-frequency energy from the environment rather than carrying an internal battery, which is the specific engineering approach that allows it to have, in principle, no fixed battery-life limit.

Can Wiliot replace RFID? Not universally, and Wiliot’s own published materials don’t claim it should. RFID retains a genuine advantage for fast, high-volume bulk inventory counts at fixed checkpoints. Wiliot’s pitch is continuous visibility between those checkpoints, which is a different job, and the two technologies are frequently described — including by Wiliot’s own CEO in independent industry press — as complementary rather than competitive.

Who are Wiliot’s biggest customers or partners? The four relationships most substantively documented in public sources are Walmart (a roughly 90-million-tag retail deployment), AT&T (network infrastructure partnership), Avery Dennison (manufacturing partner and, since April 2026, strategic investor and board member), and Royal Mail (nearly one million tagged mail containers in the UK).

How much funding has Wiliot raised? Approximately $270 million through its 2021 Series C round, plus a further $75 million strategic investment from Avery Dennison announced in April 2026 — a disclosed total of roughly $345 million. Some third-party data aggregators report a higher lifetime total of $364 million, likely reflecting additional smaller or partially undisclosed rounds; the precise figure isn’t fully and consistently disclosed across all sources.

Who invested in Wiliot? Investors named in company and independent reporting include Avery Dennison, Amazon Web Services, Samsung Venture Investment Corp., SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Qualcomm Ventures, Maersk Growth, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Verizon Ventures, M Ventures, 83North, and Norwest Venture Partners, among others across multiple funding rounds since 2017.

What is the difference between Ambient IoT and Physical AI, as Wiliot uses the terms? In Wiliot’s usage, Ambient IoT refers specifically to the battery-free, energy-harvesting sensing layer — the IoT Pixels and the network that reads them. Physical AI is the broader concept the company has increasingly positioned itself around: AI systems that act on continuous, real-world sensor data rather than periodic, manually collected snapshots. Wiliot describes Ambient IoT as the primary data source feeding Physical AI systems, rather than treating the two terms as interchangeable.

Can you buy Wiliot stock as a retail investor? Not through a standard brokerage account, since Wiliot is private. Accredited investors can, in some cases, access Wiliot shares through private secondary marketplaces, subject to shareholder-side availability and company transfer restrictions — this is a fundamentally different and higher-risk category of investment than buying listed public stock, and isn’t something this article recommends one way or the other.

This article uses information that is publicly available as of August 2026. Wiliot is a privately held company, and details like number of employees, funding raised, and performance metrics have been taken from company statements and other sources where independent verification could not be obtained; those who need current information specific to deployments can verify directly with Wiliot.