2025: The Year Ambient IoT Labels Become Mainstream?

While smart labels and energy harvesting are not new topics to anybody following Internet of Things (IoT) innovation, 2025 has seen a marked shift with the convergence of these technologies and with the diversification of suppliers rolling out offerings.

At the end of June 2025, Energous announced its e-Sense battery-free tag. Energous, traditionally a supplier of Radio Frequency (RF) energy transmitters, has struggled to find precisely the most successful applications for its energy transmitters in an IoT market that has been slow to adopt energy harvesting. As a result, while it primarily positions itself as the “gateway” layer between sensors and cloud, it has built out its technology stack across sensors, transmitters, and its e-Compass cloud-based platform with the goal of being able to demonstrate with Proofs of Concept (PoCs) the opportunity for its RF transmission technology. While Energous has made a number of other RF-powered sensors in the past, its most important partner, to date, has been Wiliot, which uses Energous’ transmitters to energize its Pixel labels. From this perspective, offering a smart label may be considered an odd move given the success of Wiliot’s own technology, to date, and the likely competition this creates. On the other hand, the launch may also be seen as helping to seed the market with RF-powered labels, adding a greater diversity of suppliers to what has, so far, been a one-vendor market.

Diversification of suppliers is key to success in verticals and to accelerated innovation for energy-harvesting smart labels. Diversification in the RF-harvesting market is particularly important given that a large number of announcements around label launches have focused on Photovoltaic (PV)-harvesting technologies. Four key announcements, all in June 2025 (likely timed for Sensors Converge),  include Linxens’ partnership with Dracula Technologies; leading Real-Time Location System (RTLS) provider Paragon ID’s partnership with Dracula Technologies; Minew’s launch of its MTB11 light-powered label with InPlay, Epishine, and e-peas (with forecast 1 million shipments over the coming 3 years); and Epishine’s concept partnership with NGK to combine the former’s solar cells with the latter’s battery technology to create a 1.6 Millimeter (mm)-thick FindMy-compatible tracker. It also comes on the heels of yet another important design win for Dracula Technologies with Truvami in September 2024, launching a LoRaWAN-based light-powered smart label.

While many similar announcements have been made over the past few years, they have been scattered and have not resulted in any major commercial orders. What is striking now is the density of these announcements and the alignment of these label launches with commercial expectations. In conversations with silicon vendors, these suppliers have noted enormous 3 to 5-year pipelines for energy harvesting-based asset tracking solutions, suggesting that design announcements are moving to commercial reality.

Additionally, the announcements highlight a convergence of two separate IoT trends: the growth of smart label devices, and the growth of energy harvesting or Ambient IoT devices.

On the smart label side, innovation in chip size and power consumption, and in printed battery technology, have been expanding this market gradually. RFID label suppliers such as Identiv, Avery Dennison, Beontag, Tageos, and others have all started to position themselves more actively by expanding their label platform with other connectivity technologies (in particular, Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE)). Chip and component vendors have also sought to take advantage of this opportunity. InPlay has demonstrated both with design wins (such as Identiv and Minew) and launched its latest IN120 chip (launched, you guessed it, June 2025), which it describes as “specifically engineered for high-volume smart label applications,” and designed to be integrated in existing roll-to-roll RFID inlay manufacturing processes. Molex, in the meantime, with expertise in flexible electronics, looks to seed the market further by launching its own device—the TrackLabel Bluetooth® LE (yes, launched June 2025). Meanwhile, device Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have continued to experiment with battery-powered smart label technologies—including traditional supply chain OEMs like OnAsset Intelligence, Roambee, and Controlant; and disruptors like Trackonomy, which has recorded massive deals with a dizzying array of smart label technologies.

On the Ambient IoT side, there has been significant messaging around the opportunities for energy harvesting. The work of standards bodies such as the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), IEEE, and The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) have sought to support OEMs in their endeavors to overcome engineering challenges. Wiliot has been a champion of Ambient IoT within the Bluetooth® space, so far, but other suppliers are also looking to make a name for themselves, such as HaiLa, a semiconductor company focusing on RF backscatter communication using its Wi-Fi chips (showcasing, of course, in June 2025, the working of a system using HaiLa’s BSC2000 chip and Energous’ RF transmitters). RFID suppliers are also increasingly looking to create messaging around the role and positioning of RFID within Ambient IoT, and the complementarity of Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) RFID with the broader array of “passive” energy harvesting technologies.  

The significance of these events is clear. First, there is renewed and organic interest in energy harvesting smart labels, setting off likely high growth over the coming years for adoption of these technologies instead of Research and Development (R&D). Second, the diversification of suppliers will have an enormous impact on adopter acceptance of the technologies by creating innovation in verticals and offering all-important choice and supplier redundancy. Third, an ecosystem is being created that goes beyond label vendors and toward integrated systems. Fourth, the impact will primarily be felt within supply chains as adopters move toward item-level visibility and, more broadly, toward digitizing more assets to automate data collection activities and gather more operational insights.

The impact of these events should be noted by a number of supplier types that should all pay attention:

• RFID Label Suppliers: As they seek to diversify their label platforms, they should look to understand the opportunities both from battery-powered labels and how energy harvesting technologies like RF and PV will complement them. RFID label suppliers will be a key manufacturing partner that will bring these technologies to market at scale, with growth rates to an important degree focused on their decisions. RFID suppliers should also look to understand the broader Ambient IoT opportunity and where RFID will sit next to other smart label technologies. 
• Silicon Vendors Across Microcontroller Units (MCUs), RF, and Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMICs): While energy harvesting has been a good marketing message hitherto, not many of these suppliers have been fully invested in chasing opportunities because of the additional cost and design times behind energy harvesting devices. Several of these announcements highlight the extensive opportunities for supporting OEMs, as well as different market development activities they can engage in to position themselves as leaders.
• Energy Harvesting Companies: Energy harvesting has been a tough market, to date, but is coming to fruition as demonstrated by a few innovators in particular. Positioning their solutions within this fast-evolving market will be important to not be left behind.
• Platform and Solution Providers: One of the great challenges that remains fundamentally is the management in the back end of vast quantities of data that come from very cheap sensors that can be ubiquitously deployed. This will require buy-in from vertical leaders and software platforms. Today, smart label technologies are primarily at the stage of getting the hardware engineering and system design right; success of these technologies, however, will be determined by the ability to utilize the data effectively.