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.

Read more at https://averydennison.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/avery-dennison-announces-strategic-75-million-investment-wiliot

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The move puts one of the most recognisable long term growth investors in Europe squarely behind a company that sits at the heart of the RAIN RFID industry. Impinj supplies the tag chips, reader chips, and complete reader systems that make passive UHF tagging work at scale, and its technology is deeply embedded in retail, healthcare, airport baggage handling, and manufacturing supply chains.

For a firm with Baillie Gifford’s track record of backing companies through long innovation cycles, Impinj fits the profile. RAIN RFID is moving from an inventory management tool used by early adopters to a core piece of supply chain infrastructure, and Impinj is one of the few pure play suppliers able to provide the silicon that powers it. Every tag that ends up on a garment, a pallet, or a pharmaceutical carton drives chip volumes, and those volumes are climbing as more sectors adopt item level tagging.

The investment lands at an interesting moment for Impinj’s share price. Shares opened the day at $104.71, well below a 52 week high of $247.06 and closer to the $62.94 low. Analyst sentiment is mixed, with a consensus rating of Hold and an average price target of $167.63. Recent earnings were in line with expectations at $0.50 per share, on revenue of $92.85 million that slightly topped estimates, though the company still carries a negative net margin and has guided to a softer first quarter.

Despite the near term noise, the longer term story is compelling enough to attract the kind of capital Baillie Gifford commits. RAIN RFID tag shipments are on a sustained growth curve, and Impinj retains a dominant position in the reader chip market, which gives it pricing leverage and a direct window into customer demand. New verticals including food, logistics, and passwordless authentication are starting to scale, and each one pulls on the same core silicon that Impinj designs.

Beyond Baillie Gifford, other institutional investors have been adjusting their positions as well. Bessemer Group and Advisors Asset Management both added to their holdings in recent quarters, suggesting that a wider cohort of professional investors is willing to look past quarterly volatility in pursuit of the longer RAIN RFID growth story.

For the RFID industry, the signal is worth noting. When a firm with Baillie Gifford’s reputation for patient capital takes a new position in a pure play RAIN RFID supplier, it reinforces the view that the technology has moved beyond early adoption and into the kind of structural growth phase that long term investors try hard not to miss.

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The Series A round was led by strategic investor SaaS Fee Limited, with strong participation from California-based venture capital firm Shea Ventures, Montreal-based TandemLaunch, and several individual strategic investors. This diverse group of backers reflects confidence in INLAN’s technology and its potential to transform how data is captured and used within supply chain and industrial environments.  

At the heart of INLAN’s solution is a new class of battery-less tag that merges the cost-effectiveness traditionally associated with RFID technology and the performance capabilities of active IoT devices. According to company co-founders Ali Shajii and Mohammad Hajikhani, these tags have been developed over the past two years to offer scalable, reliable sensing at a fraction of the cost and complexity of existing solutions. The funding will help transition this hardware into large-scale deployment while also expanding the software and data backbone needed to support massive IoT adoption.  

In practical terms, the combination of passive tag design with sophisticated data infrastructure means that every item in a supply chain could potentially report on its location, condition and other operational metrics in real time. This enhanced visibility is intended to help businesses improve operational efficiency, support automation and provide more reliable data for AI-driven decision-making.  

INLAN’s technology was incubated at TandemLaunch, a Montreal-based deep-tech start-up foundry and seed fund. Emilie Boutros, Managing Partner at TandemLaunch, said the international investor support demonstrates growing confidence in the company’s approach to large-scale data collection in industrial IoT and supply chain management.  

By reducing the trade-off between cost and performance inherent in traditional sensor technologies, INLAN aims to make continuous, reliable, item-level intelligence accessible to enterprises everywhere. The successful Series A round positions the company to play a leading role in the next generation of intelligent supply chain operations.

Click here to view their press release

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