The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most fascinating opportunities in our time. The ability to track potentially billions of items opens up new possibilities in many fields; just consider how food and medicines can be monitored for safety and environmental conditions.

However, there are plenty of challenges before the IoT reaches its full potential. The first challenge is cost, then comes how you attach the tags to these billions of items. Then you need a software system capable of monitoring the tags.

With its ambient IoT Pixels and Wiliot Cloud platform, Wiliot is moving ahead in the IoT segment. The Israeli-headquartered company recently placed an order for 25 million RFID tags from Identiv, and also is working with Avery Dennison among other RFID specialists. Its IoT Pixels are either powered by harvesting radio frequency energy or using a thin printed battery. All of the data is sent to the Wiliot Cloud, where users can process the information.

With numerous successes in the books, Wiliot looks well positioned to be an important force in the IoT field.

Interestingly, the founders of Wiliot came up with this concept after their successful development and sale of Wilocity to Qualcomm.

“Wiliot’s three founders sold their previous pioneering enterprise Wilocity to Qualcomm, providing the cornerstone technology and ecosystem for mmWave, which is now incorporated into every 5G phone,” said Steve Statler, Wiliot’s chief manufacturing officer.

“At Qualcomm, they got to see how the IoT had bifurcated and got stuck as the internet of expensive things – either expensive infrastructure or expensive sensors,” Statler added. “They decided their second act would be the opposite of their first: they moved from premium ultrafast communication to something ultra-low cost, the scaling of the IoT to trillions of everyday things.”

Wiliot’s founders hit the ground running, with samples already out in the field within a year.

“Fast forward, and the team had a dozen pre-production test chips in a single year, V1 purchased by dozens of the biggest brands in the world of Proof of Concepts scaling to many tens of millions of tags for a handful of the biggest retailers and postal services, and a platform that is pioneering a new wave of standards for ambient IoT,” Statler noted.

Statler observed that ambient IoT is being embraced by 3GPP, IEEE, and the Bluetooth SIG, and is on its way to addressing a market that ABI sized at 10 trillion units.

“The technology is positioned to open a portal between the cloud world of AI and ChatGPT, and the physical world where every day things are going online: Food, medicine, clothing, house and car parts…really every single thing,” said Statler.

“The technology is beautiful – miracles of electronics capturing energy from the weakest signals, retaining the energy with new low levels of power leakage, it’s a completely new computing paradigm,” he pointed out. “The implications will be felt in sustainability, food and drug safety, reduction in the tax of criminality (theft, counterfeit, grey markets) and will pose an opportunity to boost the productivity of nations so we can afford to support an aging Gen X.”

Wiliot has its focus on a number of key markets that impact our lives everyday.

“Wiliot is a horizontal platform poised to disrupt almost every market vertical,” Statler noted. “To date, momentum has been highest in the following markets: retail (grocery and pharmacy in particular), postal services, defense and air transport.”

How does Wiliot’s technology work? Statler noted that there are innovations in wireless, chip, cloud, and data science, but at the heart of Wiliot is its IoT Pixel, a tiny postage stamp sized compute element that has an ARM processor with memory, Bluetooth communication, end to end encryption, and radio frequency sensing.

“The Wiliot IoT Pixel also has an edge and cloud infrastructure that allows tens of thousands of items in a store or warehouse to be tracked in real time without the expensive infrastructure of RFID,” he noted.

Wiliot is partnering with at least a few RFID and NFC companies who bring their expertise to the Wiliot ecosystem.

“We are partnering with most of the major RFID inlay and tag producers already,” said Statler. “They can use the machines and expertise honed over the last couple of decades to address a market that is 100x bigger than RFID – in many ways ambient IoT is an evolution of the RAIN RFID market.”

So far, the results have been a success.

“Wiliot has been able to achieve a variety of successes across target markets,” Statler reported. “Recently, Wiliot added a secure ID and temperature sensing, as well as fill and dilution sensing to vials of COVID-19 vaccines for pennies per vial.

“Wiliot has also successfully achieved visibility of produce from the DC to the grocery store that exposed temperature issues at a case level that was impacting freshness, waste, and shelf life,” he added. “The same visibility platform that was purchased to address omni-channel accuracy issues is also the foundation for FDA FSMA 204 food safety regulation compliance and a groundbreaking real time carbon footprint visibility system.”

Statler noted that Wiliot sees a bright future ahead for ambient IoT.

“Wiliot aims to enable a huge ambient IoT ecosystem using the new Bluetooth, 6G and 802.11 AMP standards that will figuratively ‘turn the lights on’ so we can see every single thing, everywhere all at once, creating opportunities for businesses, governments, system integrators, IoT Edge Device makers and tag manufacturers,” Statler concluded. “These efforts will help regenerate the planet with a level of visibility that is powerful enough to align the needs of people, planet, and profit.”