Radar’s Old Navy Win Highlights Shift to Second Generation of RFID—and Where Incumbents Must Innovate

At the end of March, the upstart startup integrated Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system supplier Radar announced a customer win with Old Navy, the largest brand within apparel group Gap’s portfolio. The win will see Radar’s technology deployed in a “multi-year,” “phased rollout,” with Old Navy committed to roll it out in “1,000+” stores. In its Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 report, Old Navy reported a total of 1,249 stores across North America; the Radar rollout will initially cover U.S. stores only, with a possible future expansion to Canada. Franchisee stores in an additional 10 markets are not yet covered by this deployment. With 19.8 million square feet across its North American store footprint, and current overhead reader coverage a little above 500 square feet, ABI Research estimates a deployment of around 15,000 to 16,000 readers across Old Navy shop floors in the United States.

Radar is a supplier of integrated RFID systems for retail shop floors. The company offers an overhead RFID reader enhanced with computer vision and pre-integrated with proprietary software, with the goal of providing visibility into every item in a retail store. Its overhead readers, like competitors’ readers, have the advantage of offering always-on scanning, helping to move away from the traditional point-in-time scanning paradigm of handheld readers, and enabling a wider variety of use cases. Founded in 2013, Radar has become a lot more prominent in the past couple of years after a first big win with American Eagle in 2023—hitherto its biggest customer, accounting for 565 of Radar’s currently claimed 600+ stores covered. The company has attracted enormous funding, totaling around US$104 million by the end of 2024. This demonstrates high expectations for the renascent RFID market; indeed, Radar claims a contracted pipeline for US$47 million in 2025, which, if true, would propel it quickly to be one of the largest companies in the UHF RFID market.

There are numerous interesting components to Radar’s growth.

First among these is the large overhead RFID reader deployment—a reader type gaining significant interest from customers in the past 24 months. Traditional handheld readers, while enabling cycle counting and allowing more frequent inventory checks than manual counting, only gather point-in-time data. Overhead readers, by contrast, allow always-on scanning; this permits not only real-time inventory accuracy, particularly important in retailers’ omnichannel strategies, but also a huge expansion of potential use cases for improving store experience such as locating items on the shop floor and streamlining store associates’ workflows to better manage stores, such as finding, receiving, or replenishment workflows. An additional workflow that RFID suppliers and adopters are looking to enable with the technology is analyzing how consumers interact with individual products and shelves, enabling retailers to gather more data on consumer purchasing habits and to optimize their store layouts and product lines accordingly.

The growth of overhead readers heralds a shift to a second generation of UHF RFID as the market moves beyond expectations of 99% inventory accuracy and expects RFID solutions to optimize operations and workflows. Suppliers across the board are seeing increased demand for overhead readers both for in-store inventory and experience use cases, as well as for theft prevention, point-of-sale validation, or product receipt and dispatch in warehouses and back of stores. Store operations platforms such as GreyOrange and Manhattan Associates, not traditional RFID suppliers, have launched their own RFID-enabled products, betting in particular on overhead readers as a way of enhancing their platforms’ functionalities for workforce, store inventory, and omnichannel management, and with a big focus on store associate experience and performance. PervasID is similarly seeing an increase in partnerships for its overhead readers, such as with SML IIS, GreyOrange, and Global Security Solutions (GSS)—spun out from Prosegur in 2024.

A second interesting component to note is the different go-to-market model that is growing in prominence and demonstrated by Radar’s win. Traditionally, large-scale RFID deployments have been dominated by a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach, in which adopters purchase readers and manage most of the software development and integration in-house. Increasingly, customers want to purchase bundled solutions in which suppliers manage the RFID heavy lifting and provide Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from which adopters or their System Integrators (SIs) can easily integrate data into a wide variety of internal enterprise systems. This is the approach taken by leading suppliers like Nedap and Sensormatic, whose ability to offer pre-integrated hardware and software is cited by customers as key among their decisions to purchase. This shift toward out-of-the-box solutions is gaining traction fast, as demonstrated by a wide variety of partnerships and acquisitions, for instance: Levata’s acquisition of SLS in 2021; SML’s recent partnerships with PervasID, Zebra, and Rielec; GreyOrange’s partnerships with PervasID, Keonn, and Zebra; or Xemelgo’s partnership with Zebra. This ability to provide an entire bundled system and API access is key to the reason for Radar’s win over incumbent vendors like Zebra or Impinj.  

A third impactful component of the announcement is the growing importance of computer vision and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in combination with RFID, both of which are a central part of Radar’s offering. Multi-technology solutions are increasingly expected by customers to address a wider variety of use cases in stores and to address blind spots. Computer vision can provide insight on shopper movements and behaviors, as well as on products that are not RFID-tagged. Point-of-Sale (POS) use cases, theft prevention, store layout optimization, and many other use cases can leverage machine vision to address RFID blind spots. AI is additionally touted for several purposes in the RFID world: improving read rates and detecting items with missing or unreadable tags, computer vision trained with ML models, or—perhaps with the most direct Return on Investment (ROI) impact—simply using the vast quantities of data generated by item-level RFID to better analyze merchandising, inventory, or other performance trends. Radar is not the only company looking to use these technologies, and these capabilities will increasingly become mainstream requirements for creating value.

Radar’s win is a sign of the maturity of the RFID ecosystem, and its evolution. The challenges with RFID now are not primarily around the technology, but around the go-to-market strategy, with the goal of making it as easy as possible for adopters to integrate the technology within their operations without having to master the complexities of the technology itself. Incumbents should look to disruptive vendors to understand how they can evolve their own portfolios to meet the needs of both their System Integrator (SI) partners and their end customers; both direct system sales and indirect sales through software and integrator partners will continue to play a large role in the market going forward. In particular, suppliers should take the following steps:

• Think About Selling Systems and Edge Devices, Not Hardware: Data access from readers and out-of-the-box integrations are key to lowering the technical barrier to entry.
• Think About Partnerships with Software Vendors: With RFID technology now mature, the focus is increasingly on software to help adopters maximize the value of RFID deployments. Software is driving this market forward, as demonstrated not only by Radar, but also by the growing number of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions seeing growth.
• Think About Messaging and Enablement for Integrators and Enterprise Software: Integrators and enterprise software are not experts in RFID, but will be able to derive significant benefits from plug-and-play solutions that sit side by side with their systems and allow them to focus on higher levels of value; for instance, AI and advanced analytics. Enabling these companies to enter the market will help bring RFID to the mainstream by making RFID systems simply another easy-to-integrate part of a customer’s technology stack.  
• Think Beyond RFID: RFID is one part of the automation puzzle. Automation requires a mix of technologies, of which RFID is just one component, and deep end-market knowledge. Out-of-the-box solutions targeting specific workflows and that take a multi-technology approach to solve customer pain points are increasingly showing the way forward with the technology.