Battery-free IoT investment to help connect products in supply chain
The company’s platform comprises tiny low-cost, self-powered tags – called Wiliot IoT Pixels – that attach to any product or packaging to sense a range of physical and environment data that is then fed into the Wiliot Cloud, where machine learning algorithms translate data into actionable insights for businesses across a range of industries. The Wiliot Cloud also ensures data remains secure, private, and authentic.
For decades, says the company, there has remained a massive gap as trillions of products travel billions of miles without any data being available as to their status, whereabouts, or situation, leaving global supply chains in the dark. The company’s platform is designed to help companies in industries including consumer-packaged goods, pharmaceuticals, furniture, and apparel add sensing capabilities, intelligence, and connectivity to their products.
Effectively, says the company, products that were off-line during their manufacturing, shipping, and consumption journeys are now online – a reality that is changing the way products are made, distributed, sold, used, reused, and recycled. Wiliot-enabled products and packaging can sense temperature, fill level, motion, location changes, humidity, and proximity.
Wiliot IoT Pixels can be integrated into vaccine vials, food packaging, and more, bringing real-time transparency to the supply chain, and the ability for brands for the first time to understand inventory levels throughout their retail channels. They can even understand how their products are used in customers’ homes through a highly secure, privacy-protected platform.
This omniscient view of the supply chain built on people’s usage, says the company, allows a new paradigm called Demand Chain, which promises to slash the required capital that’s non-productively tied up in inventories. Products will be able to self-reorder based on usage, accelerating the adoption of the “subscription economy” as brands transform their business models.
“Wiliot has created a vision of the future of AI-enabled IoT, and we are delighted that SoftBank is supporting us in making this future a reality,” says Tal Tamir, Wiliot’s CEO. “IoT is a vision created around Things and our mission at Wiliot is to use cutting edge hardware, AI-based sensing and an innovative business model to implement a safer and more transparent world, a world in which all the things around us help consumers use them better and suppliers avoid waste.”
The company says that it will use the latest round of capital to grow its team and scale its channels for the forthcoming launch of its V2 product, which offers next-generation performance that will help accelerate its vision for a new IoT.
Yanni Pipilis, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers adds, “By inventing the first hyper-scalable, self-powered computer that uses AI to sense the world, Wiliot is positioned to bring together the digital and physical. We have always believed that with IoT and AI, people will live better and healthier lives – where any food or medicine has the ability to understand if it’s safe to use and communicate seamlessly with people. We are pleased to play a part in helping Wiliot dramatically scale the ever-expanding application of IoT globally.”
SoftBank joins existing investors that include 83North, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), Avery Dennison, Grove Ventures, M Ventures, the corporate VC of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, Maersk Growth, Norwest Venture Partners, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures LLC, Samsung Venture Investment Corp., Vintage Investment Partners, and Verizon Ventures.
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