Avery Dennison Corporation (NYSE: AVY) has put fresh capital and a board seat behind ambient IoT specialist Wiliot, taking a $75 million minority stake in a deal that cements one of the most closely watched partnerships in the connected products world.
Announced from Mentor, Ohio on 27 April 2026, the strategic investment deepens a relationship that has been quietly maturing since 2022. It also formalises Avery Dennison’s role as Wiliot’s preferred inlay design, manufacturing, and commercial partner, and gives the global labelling giant a full board seat alongside the observer position it already held.
The headline number is the easy bit. The strategic logic underneath it tells a more interesting story for anyone watching how the identification and sensing market is shifting.
Wiliot’s IoT Pixels are stamp-sized, battery-free compute devices that harvest energy from ambient radio waves and report data over Bluetooth Low Energy. Pair them with cloud-based AI and machine learning, and you get continuous visibility of inventory, location, and condition across retail backrooms, distribution centres, and food cold chains. The pitch is supply chain intelligence at the item level, with infrastructure costs much closer to passive RFID than to traditional active sensor networks.
Francisco Melo, president of intelligent labels technologies and digital solutions at Avery Dennison, framed the move in plain terms. “We believe in passive Bluetooth Low-Energy and the opportunity to expand our portfolio with Wiliot’s solutions,” he said, adding that BLE is complementary to RFID and opens up new addressable markets the company could not previously serve with UHF RAIN tags alone.
For Wiliot, having an inlay manufacturer of Avery Dennison’s scale on board removes one of the biggest blockers to mass adoption of ambient IoT: industrial-grade tag production. Co-founder and CEO Tal Tamir was direct about the significance. “Avery Dennison is a global leader in digital identification solutions and the premier partner required to realize accelerating demand,” he said.
The two companies say they will now expand their joint go-to-market efforts across retail, logistics, and food, the same verticals where item-level RFID has driven much of Avery Dennison’s recent growth in intelligent labels.
For the wider RFID and auto-ID industry, the message is clear. Passive UHF RFID and ambient BLE are not in competition. They are stacking. UHF still wins for fast bulk reads at portals and dock doors. Battery-free BLE adds richer sensor data and direct readability from any modern smartphone or tablet. Brands that want to know where every unit is, what condition it is in, and how shoppers interact with it will increasingly want both technologies on the same item, often in the same inlay.
With $75 million of Avery Dennison capital now on the table, that vision just got a significant push toward scale.