Avery Dennison Deepens Its Bet on Ambient IoT
Global materials science and digital identification leader Avery Dennison has announced a new US$75 million strategic investment in Wiliot, a pioneer in Ambient IoT technologies. The move marks the third major investment partnership between the two companies following Wiliot’s Series B financing in 2019 and Series C round in 2021.
This latest investment represents far more than additional financial backing. Avery Dennison has now secured a board seat at Wiliot and become the company’s preferred global partner for inlay design, manufacturing, and commercialization. The relationship has evolved from an early-stage strategic investment into a deeply integrated alliance spanning technology development, production capacity, cloud infrastructure, and market deployment.
The progression of the partnership reflects a clear strategic escalation. In 2019, Avery Dennison joined Wiliot’s US$30 million Series B round primarily as an early positioning move in emerging IoT infrastructure. By 2021, cooperation expanded into technology collaboration during Wiliot’s Series C financing. Today, the relationship has entered a new phase: Avery Dennison will support Wiliot’s ambitions for multi-billion-unit label production, while Wiliot’s battery-free Bluetooth tags will integrate directly into Avery Dennison’s atma.io connected product cloud platform, creating an end-to-end “tag-cloud-AI” ecosystem.
At its core, the investment signals Avery Dennison’s conviction that Ambient IoT and Physical AI will become foundational technologies for next-generation supply chain intelligence, with Wiliot positioned as a key enabler of that transformation.
Ambient IoT and RFID: Complementary Technologies, Not Competitors
Different Technologies Designed for Different Tasks
Ambient IoT is often described as a disruptive replacement for RFID, but the reality is more nuanced. The two technologies are fundamentally designed for different operational priorities, making coexistence and collaboration more likely than outright substitution.
Traditional UHF RFID remains highly effective because of its simplicity, scalability, and cost efficiency. Passive RFID tags rely on dedicated readers and primarily transmit snapshot-style identification data. Their strengths lie in rapid bulk scanning, mature ecosystem support, and extremely low per-unit costs. As a result, RFID continues to dominate applications such as retail inventory counting, warehouse receiving and shipping, and low-cost asset tracking.
By contrast, Wiliot’s Ambient IoT platform also operates without batteries but harvests energy from surrounding radio frequencies including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular signals. Unlike conventional RFID systems, Ambient IoT tags can communicate through smartphones or standard gateways without requiring specialized readers.
More importantly, Ambient IoT enables continuous sensing rather than isolated scans. In addition to identity data, tags can capture real-time information such as location, temperature, humidity, light exposure, and vibration. This makes the technology particularly suitable for cold-chain logistics, cross-regional supply chain monitoring, and high-value asset management where condition awareness is as important as location visibility.
Real-World Deployments Already Demonstrate Clear Role Separation
Practical deployments increasingly show that RFID and Ambient IoT address complementary operational needs rather than overlapping ones.
For example, Royal Mail has adopted Wiliot’s technology to monitor rolling containers across its national logistics network in real time. Meanwhile, Walmart continues to rely heavily on RFID for high-speed shelf inventory management and store-level stock visibility.
Together, these deployments illustrate a hybrid operational model: RFID delivers fast and cost-efficient inventory execution, while Ambient IoT provides persistent, data-rich visibility across broader supply chain environments.
RFID’s Cost and Ecosystem Advantages Remain Difficult to Disrupt
Despite rapid advances in Ambient IoT, RFID retains significant structural advantages that are unlikely to disappear in the near future.
Even as Wiliot’s third-generation tags reduce production costs, Ambient IoT devices remain several times more expensive than standard RFID labels. For trillion-unit, low-margin consumer goods markets, cost sensitivity remains a critical barrier to large-scale replacement.
RFID also benefits from more than two decades of industry standardization, infrastructure deployment, and ecosystem maturity. Global standards, interoperable hardware and software systems, and proven return-on-investment models continue to make RFID highly attractive for enterprises seeking fast deployment and operational predictability.
Avery Dennison itself has publicly emphasized that Bluetooth-based Ambient IoT solutions should be viewed as complementary to RFID rather than competitive replacements.
Building the Infrastructure Layer for the Physical AI Era
From Identification to Continuous Intelligence
Wiliot’s long-term ambition extends far beyond replacing RFID. Its broader objective is to close the data gap between the physical world and artificial intelligence by creating a real-time sensing layer for Physical AI systems.
Traditional RFID systems primarily answer a basic question: “Is the item present?” Ambient IoT, however, continuously generates contextual operational data — where an item is located, what environmental conditions it is experiencing, whether anomalies are occurring, and how assets are moving through supply chains in real time.
This high-frequency, always-on data stream is increasingly valuable for AI-driven supply chain applications such as predictive maintenance, inventory optimization, risk detection, and operational automation. In this sense, Ambient IoT is positioned not as a replacement technology, but as an expansion of supply chain intelligence capabilities.
The Future Is a Hybrid Supply Chain Sensing Model
Avery Dennison’s third investment in Wiliot ultimately reflects a larger industry transition: the evolution from traditional labeling and identification businesses toward Physical AI infrastructure platforms.
That transition, however, will not eliminate RFID. Instead, the future supply chain ecosystem is likely to combine both technologies in a layered architecture:
- RFID will continue to power rapid, low-cost inventory and warehouse operations.
- Ambient IoT will enable continuous monitoring and intelligent sensing throughout transportation and distribution networks.
- Integrated cloud and AI platforms will unify data from both systems to create more adaptive and autonomous supply chains.
Rather than competing for dominance, RFID and Ambient IoT are increasingly becoming complementary pillars of the next-generation connected enterprise.