Wiliot
American battery-free Bluetooth IoT tag and chip manufacturer
Wiliot is a technology company that designs battery-free Bluetooth tags, called IoT Pixels, which harvest energy from ambient radio waves rather than relying on an internal battery to broadcast identification and sensor data. The tags are…
Definition
Wiliot is a technology company that designs battery-free Bluetooth tags, called IoT Pixels, which harvest energy from ambient radio waves rather than relying on an internal battery to broadcast identification and sensor data. The tags are designed to be attached to individual products or packaging, letting businesses track items through a supply chain at item-level granularity without the cost and maintenance burden of battery-powered trackers. Wiliot supplies both the tag chips and cloud software that processes the location and sensor data those tags generate.
Overview
Wiliot was founded to address a specific limitation in existing tracking technology: conventional Bluetooth trackers and even many RFID tags require either a battery that needs periodic replacement or bulky reader infrastructure, making it impractical to tag every individual item moving through a supply chain rather than just pallets or cases. The company's answer is a battery-free tag that harvests small amounts of energy from ambient radio frequency signals, such as Wi-Fi and cellular transmissions already present in most environments, enough to periodically power a low-energy Bluetooth broadcast. Mechanically, each Wiliot tag, referred to as an ambient IoT Pixel, contains a tiny chip and antenna printed onto a thin, low-cost substrate, with no internal battery. The chip captures ambient radio frequency energy, stores just enough charge to broadcast a short Bluetooth Low Energy signal containing an identifier and, on some tag types, sensor readings like temperature, and then repeats this cycle continuously as long as ambient energy is available. Existing Bluetooth-capable devices, including smartphones and dedicated gateway hardware, can pick up these broadcasts and relay the data to Wiliot's cloud platform, which aggregates location and condition data across a fleet of tagged items. Within the broader item-level tracking landscape, Wiliot's ambient power approach differentiates it from passive RFID, which requires a dedicated reader emitting radio energy at close range, and from active Bluetooth trackers, which need a battery and are more suited to reusable high-value assets than disposable packaging. This lets Wiliot target a price point and form factor aimed specifically at tagging individual retail products and shipping units at a scale that would be uneconomical with battery-powered alternatives. In practice, retailers and consumer goods manufacturers use Wiliot tags to track individual products from factory to store shelf, monitoring cold-chain conditions for perishable goods and improving inventory accuracy without manual scanning at every checkpoint. Because the tags broadcast passively and get picked up by ambient Bluetooth infrastructure, deployments can extend visibility into store aisles and even end-consumer environments in ways that reader-dependent RFID cannot as easily match. The trade-offs of ambient-powered tags are inherent to the energy-harvesting approach: broadcast frequency and range depend on how much ambient radio energy is available in a given environment, which can be less predictable than a battery-powered or actively-read system, and the technology is newer and less standardized than established barcode and RFID infrastructure that many supply chains already run. Businesses with mature RFID deployments may weigh Wiliot's item-level, infrastructure-light approach against the cost of adding a new, less battle-tested tagging system alongside existing barcode and RFID processes.
Key Features
- Battery-free tags that harvest energy from ambient radio waves
- Bluetooth Low Energy broadcasts readable by existing smartphones and gateways
- Item-level tagging economical enough for individual retail products
- Optional sensor variants reporting temperature for cold-chain monitoring
- Cloud platform aggregating tag data across supply chain locations
- Thin, low-cost tag form factor suited to packaging integration
- No reader infrastructure required at close range, unlike passive RFID