The announcement, made today, is a useful signal of where retail RFID is heading, not least because of whose ceilings this hardware already hangs from. Barcelona-based Keonn’s equipment is in use with retailers including H&M, Fabletics, Under Armour, River Island and Marks & Spencer, Impinj told RFID News. Keonn expects to have 1,600 stores online by the end of 2026, with 80,000 devices deployed across more than 20 retailers on five continents.

The problem both companies are chasing is inventory distortion: the combined cost of out-of-stocks and overstocks, which the announcement puts at an estimated $1.7 trillion a year globally. The root cause is that most stores still rely on periodic, largely manual inventory counts that are slow, labour-intensive and error-prone. Overhead RFID reading, where ceiling-mounted readers continuously scan the sales floor and stockroom below, promises to replace those counts entirely. Historically, though, such systems have struggled to deliver the accuracy, coverage and speed retailers demand, especially in the crowded conditions at the back of store.

A 9,000-item store test

To mirror a real enterprise deployment, Keonn and Impinj tested a full-scale retail store layout containing more than 9,000 tagged items, covered by multiple AdvanTrack-600 systems. Back-of-store is the hard part: densely packed shelves create read blind spots and slow the refresh rate of inventory data. For the test, the systems were upgraded with Gen2X improvements to tag read range and inventory speed, along with optimisations to Impinj’s E family reader chips made specifically for overhead reading.

The results are striking. Reaching over 90% inventory accuracy in back-of-store operations previously took around 58 minutes. With the upgraded AdvanTrack-600, the average fell to roughly seven and a half minutes, an improvement of more than sevenfold. The number of missing items dropped from more than 550 to fewer than 275, a 53% reduction in back-of-store blind spots. For a retailer, that means stock problems surface sooner, shelves are replenished faster, and the stock position a website shows a customer is far more likely to be true, with knock-on benefits for out-of-stocks, shrink, excess inventory and omnichannel fulfilment.

“Using Impinj’s innovations, our overhead readers are dramatically reducing inventory times and numbers of missing tags, differentiating our AdvanTrack series from competing solutions. Gen2X capabilities are hugely impactful for inventory management efficiency and accuracy, improving scanning automation in retail stores, warehouses, and factories.”

Ramir De Porrata-Doria, co-founder and managing director, Keonn Technologies

What are Gen2 and Gen2X?

Gen2 is the shared language of UHF RFID. Formally EPC UHF Gen2, and standardised internationally as ISO/IEC 18000-63, it is the air interface protocol first ratified by GS1 in 2004 that defines exactly how a reader and a tag talk to each other over the air. It is the reason the RAIN RFID market works the way it does: a tag from any manufacturer can be read by a reader from any other. The protocol has evolved over two decades. Gen2v2 added security and anti-counterfeiting features in 2013, and GS1 released Gen2v3 in 2024 with faster inventory, improved read range and new tag filtering commands. ISO standardisation of Gen2v3 is expected during 2026.

Gen2X is Impinj’s own set of enhancements layered on top of that standard. It lives in otherwise unused protocol space, so it is fully standards-compatible: a Gen2X-enabled reader still reads any ordinary Gen2 tag, and a Gen2X-capable tag responds normally to any ordinary reader. The extra performance switches on when Impinj silicon sits at both ends of the conversation, through its E family reader chips and R700 readers on one side and its M800 series (and updated M700 series) tag chips on the other. Impinj says the extensions push performance well beyond the standard, with read range gains of up to 75% and inventory speeds up to twice as fast, and that more than 100 Gen2X-enabled inlays and over 50 reader models reached the market within the first year.

That last point is why a Keonn story is also an Impinj story. Impinj is sometimes thought of as a reader manufacturer, but most of the readers affected by this news do not carry its logo. The company supplies the reader chips found inside fixed, handheld and overhead readers from a long list of manufacturers, alongside its own R700 range, as well as the tag chips inside billions of inlays. Keonn’s AdvanTrack-600 is built on Impinj’s E710 reader chip, so when Impinj improves what that chip can do, much of it arriving as firmware, the gains flow straight through to partner hardware like Keonn’s.

Hearing smaller tags

The area coverage results address the other big worry retailers have about overhead reading. Tag chips keep shrinking, both to cut manufacturing cost and to fit smaller items, and a smaller tag’s reply is quieter and harder for a reader to hear. Gen2X extends the reader’s listening range to compensate. In Impinj lab testing on the AdvanTrack-600, switching on Gen2X expanded area coverage at every read speed setting while raising read rates, with throughput at the fastest setting jumping from 19 to 324 tags per second.

Where this goes next

For Impinj, the Keonn results are a marker of direction. The company told RFID News the story is “a good example of where we see the technology going”: beyond periodic inventory counts and towards continuous, real-time visibility of what retailers actually have and where it is. That data does not just fix replenishment, Impinj argues. It also gives enterprise AI systems something they have rarely had to work with, an accurate live picture of physical inventory rather than a stale snapshot. The company says more real-world stories with its customers and partners are on the way.

Inventory distortion has been a stubborn problem for as long as retail has existed, and the rewards for solving it are enormous. On these numbers, and at this deployment scale, continuous overhead reading has stopped being an experiment.

Based on a Keonn and Impinj announcement of 19 August 2026. More at keonn.com and impinj.com.