Exiting Stealth, Trackonomy Sweeps Visibility World Before It

It has been a big 12 months for Trackonomy. Founded in 2017 with the goal of innovating around smart labels for supply chain visibility, the company has remained in stealth mode despite enormous fundraising activities to the tune of around US$265 million by the end of 2021—mostly raised from Venture Capital (VC) firms like 8VC and Night Owl Ventures, but also from supply chain technology suppliers like Lineage. 8VC and Lineage have previously jointly invested in other innovative supply chain technology companies, including project44 and Flexport. Trackonomy’s stealth mode veil was lifted a little in September 2024 with the launch and public availability of its SmartTape technology, a cellular smart label device that attaches to a range of logistics units, whether transport assets or individual products. Since then, Trackonomy has seen a flurry of activity on four fronts:

• Main Customer Has Scaled: Trackonomy has been working with UPS on three smart label and visibility programs.
  1. First, Trackonomy has worked to bring visibility to UPS’s pharmaceutical shipments; this started during Operation Warp Speed to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine and has expanded to the entire UPS healthcare division, including Marken. Trackonomy now powers all of UPS Healthcare’s Platinum and Gold shipments with Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE), LoRa, and cellular smart labels.
  2. Second, Trackonomy has been the major technology provider behind UPS’s Smart Parcel, Smart Facility (SPSF) program. In addition to providing labels, this program has seen Trackonomy deploy readers in over 1,000 U.S. facilities for UPS, as well as 100,000 box trucks in 2024 and 2025. These multi-sensor platforms are Trackonomy’s proprietary design, contain cellular Cat-4 backhaul, and act as a gateway for LoRa, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth® LE, and Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) labels and devices.
  3. Third, Trackonomy is responsible for tracking UPS’s entire 60,000-strong Unit Load Device (ULD) fleet for better visibility into ground operations and in-network airline visibility, part of UPS’s Gateway Technology Automation Platform (GTAP). UPS has stated that the program helped it identify savings worth US$13.5 million in 2024 and US$24 million in 2025. UPS earned a Chief Information Officer (CIO) 100 award in 2025 as a result of this.
• Smaller and New Customers Grow: Trackonomy’s approach in its stealth stage was both to develop its technology Intellectual Property (IP) and to identify key logistics areas to make its technology scalable. Building on its success with UPS, the company has begun replicating this path across other customers. The first customer is Delta, a long-term customer that has been using Trackonomy’s labels and software to optimize ULDs and ground handling equipment. The partnership expanded in November with the launch of Delta’s Pulse platform, in which Delta Cargo provides visibility services for its express and critical (e.g., medical) parcels (DASH and DASH Critical) with Trackonomy’s smart labels. Much of the Delta ULD business has previously belonged to OnAsset Intelligence—showing Trackonomy’s disruptive potential. The second customer is Jettainer, a ULD pooler that owns over 100,000 ULDs across 500 locations, with which Trackonomy went public in November 2025. This deployment utilized Bluetooth® LE and LoRa technologies in a mesh network, backhauled over cellular networks. While Trackonomy has exited stealth in this area, which adopters and other suppliers have publicized, it also has several customers active in other verticals and use cases that remain under wraps for the time being.
• Acquisition of InPlay: In September 2025, Trackonomy blindsided the industry by acquiring InPlay, a specialist in Bluetooth® chips with a specific focus on enabling Bluetooth® LE smart labels. InPlay’s products have won several awards, including in 2021 and 2023. Trackonomy itself does not use InPlay Systems-on-Chip (SoCs); the company’s primary goal with this acquisition was to enable the broader smart label ecosystem to build its own label devices. It is a clear signal that the company is shifting its focus from building its own smart labels to focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation software; there is also a potential data play as new smart label devices using InPlay chips are activated on Trackonomy’s software, with Trackonomy getting value from the data. In short, it is designed to create numerous label partners—not competitors.
• New Design Partnerships: InPlay itself has had a breakout year in the number of partnerships it has developed to bring smart labels to market, in particular since launching its new SoC, the NanoBeacon IN100, in June. These partnerships include Identiv, Minew, MOKO, Molex, and, most recently, Tageos. These partnerships have already yielded some results, such as Identiv’s win with IFCO to track approximately 400 million pallets using battery-powered Bluetooth® labels. InPlay also has partners outside of the smart labels market, such as Sensirion and Bosch Sensortec. Another important partnership is between Trackonomy’s InPlay and Powercast, the leading Radio Frequency (RF)-power transfer company, to create a small-form-factor humidity and temperature sensor reference design. This suggests a roadmap for Trackonomy and InPlay beyond smart labels, as well as a roadmap that leverages more energy-harvesting technology going forward. InPlay has had a partnership with Energous since 2023.

Trackonomy’s activities are significant in five ways.

1) Visibility Platforms to Automation Engines

Trackonomy’s approach to enabling enterprise supply chain visibility is differentiated in several ways. Among these are its vertically integrated offering, its multi-technology approach, and its focus on process automation and distributed intelligence rather than visibility platforms. Indeed, while Trackonomy’s most visible product is its smart labels, it is its software engine and agents, distributed across fixed and mobile gateways and cloud to reduce decision latency, that are its greatest value. One of the founding investors of Trackonomy is also a co-founder of Palantir. It is Palantir’s approach to big data, AI, and distributed intelligence in complex environments, which Trackonomy wants to replicate across its verticals—with a foundation of solid data from the physical supply chain. At the center of Trackonomy's core product is Sentient AI, which it has deployed with customers for years and unveiled in March 2025 during an AI-focused hackathon. 

Increasingly, visibility providers are shifting from User Interface (UI)-first platforms and dashboards, which are narrowly focused on ingesting and analyzing location and condition data, and toward data-agnostic signal processing engines and “decision” platforms. These engines both feed data to, and ingest data from, enterprise data lakes, where visibility signals can be contextualized alongside a broader array of physical sensor data sources and other software sources. The goal is to be a flexible, real-time, and increasingly item-level data processing engine that orchestrates actionable data signals between customers’ existing systems and facilitates data export to external business intelligence and, increasingly, AI tools. Software companies across the board, whether coming from an RFID background, an Internet of Things (IoT) background, a transportation visibility background, or any other field, are increasingly converging more on this business model.

Importantly, while it started as a smart label provider, Trackonomy’s direction is toward being a signal processing automation engine; this explains the potential it sees from broadening the smart label ecosystem, as well as its partnership with Powercast on a temperature sensor, showing it is interested in more than purely location or in-motion asset and product intelligence.

2) Smart Label Market Development

While Wiliot has been the primary pioneer in smart label technology, its approach primarily relies on a closed ecosystem with its own Pixel devices. The company’s proprietary Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) and label IP, which is licensed to third-party label manufacturers, has pioneered RF-powered Bluetooth® labels. However, this approach allows for a limited form factor and, therefore, supports a diverse range of use cases. A few other Bluetooth® label companies operate at scale, such as Reelables (which recently raised just over US$10 million in a Series A, and already ships several million labels each year) and Trackonomy, but Trackonomy’s resources will be useful to InPlay in developing off-the-shelf SoCs that can enable the broader asset tracking market to create labels. 

Off-the-shelf SoC products are coming from several angles. One vendor, HaiLa, is creating SoCs using a pared-down Bluetooth® or Wi-Fi protocol—an approach similar to Wiliot’s—to target both smart label applications and other consumer or enterprise sensing opportunities. These SoCs can work in both backscatter and active transmission modes, and its upcoming 3rd generation product is designed to be 10X more power-efficient compared to its current 2nd generation. Large silicon vendors are eyeing the growth of the smart label market, believing they can compete with specialists like Wiliot and HaiLa when market demand from large customers is sufficient to make it worthwhile. Among the giant vendors, only Renesas is actively developing and selling products for this market today. A few other Bluetooth® SoC specialists, such as Atmosic or Nordic ID, focus on creating ultra-low-power chips with a full Bluetooth® stack, but primarily target more premium markets today. While other companies are developing their portfolios, InPlay is a leader today in the number of design partners it has, and Trackonomy’s resources will help the company accelerate its development roadmap, as well as identify customers and scale projects across logistics.

3) Bluetooth® and RFID

Trackonomy’s label portfolio is broad, covering cellular, LoRa, Bluetooth®, and RFID, operating either point-to-point or in mesh architectures. The use cases for cellular labels are fairly clear; while much more expensive than Bluetooth® labels (around 10X to 15X today), they allow out-of-network coverage. In other words, they do not rely on fixed or mobile gateways.

The biggest question today, however, is the co-opetition between Bluetooth® and RFID labels. Bluetooth®, and in particular passive Bluetooth® (part of the emerging Ambient IoT category), is largely positioned as complementary to RFID today. Indeed, at the higher end of the scale, battery-assisted Bluetooth® labels have a price point that is anywhere from 10X to 100X the price of RFID labels, such that they are mostly able to target logistics applications today at the pallet or crate level. They also aim to differentiate themselves in sensing applications, with SoCs that include, or support, validated sensors—unlike RFID labels or Wiliot’s ”cloud-based” sensing. Thus, Trackonomy’s battery-assisted Bluetooth® labels are the primary powering force behind UPS’s Gold-tier shipments, offering in-network sensing, as well as more regular check-ins.

More interestingly, at the lower end of the scale, where Wiliot’s passive Bluetooth® labels sit, the complementarity of use cases between Bluetooth® and RFID is eroded, thanks in large part to a much smaller gap in price points—Wiliot’s labels being only around 3X to 5X more expensive than RFID labels. While Wiliot’s win with Walmart, deploying its “Ambient IoT” labels alongside item-level RFID, is a showcase today for harmonious coexistence, this narrative will likely break down within a few years as Wiliot starts winning more use cases for tracking products. Few companies demonstrate this direction better than Nexite, a well-funded Israeli startup, whose goal is to replace RFID for in-store retail applications with its proprietary Bluetooth® labels. While prices remain a challenge, the company is currently scaling with its first customer in Israel, in a deployment that will eventually replace RFID; it is also starting trials with a major retailer in Europe at the start of 2026. It also has a partnership in place with Checkpoint Systems, a major RFID label manufacturer, indicating that RFID suppliers are currently assessing the position of Bluetooth® and its impact on their portfolios.

4) Battery-Enabled and Battery-Free

The question of RFID complementarity becomes even more fraught when looking several years down the line, when battery-free labels start to become more common, thus removing one of the biggest parts of the Bluetooth® label Bill of Materials (BOM)—the battery. While few companies today have any scale with battery-free labels, more are experimenting, such as Paragon ID, Energous, and Nexite with RF-powered labels, or Minew with PV-powered labels. HaiLa’s SoCs, mentioned earlier, are furthermore designed to be powered by RF backscatter. The consensus is clear today that the development path of smart labels will meander from battery-enabled to battery-assisted, ultimately reaching its final battery-free destination—but this destination is certainly on the horizon.

InPlay’s partnerships with Energous and Powercast indicate that this destination is on their radar.  Trackonomy’s acquisition of InPlay will enable the broader tracking manufacturer ecosystem to become a leading aggregation point for data from Bluetooth® devices of all kinds—whether battery-enabled or battery-free. In other words, while Trackonomy’s approach has been vertically integrated so far, the company likely recognizes the rapid rate of change in the smart labels industry. It is willing to enable the broader market while focusing on its own unique value as a signal processing and automation engine. Like Avery Dennison’s atma.io product cloud, Wiliot’s cloud platform, or Qualcomm’s Aware platform, Trackonomy may seek revenue from activating InPlay-powered labels and other devices on its own cloud platform.

5) Markets

Trackonomy’s key customer segment today is logistics providers. The company claims that it is on track to be deployed across approximately 20% of the global ULD market (which ABI Research estimates to be around 180,000), and a total of 200 million Reusable Transport Assets (RTAs). Logistics has received considerable attention in recent years due to the growth in parcel delivery, both organic and accelerated by COVID-19’s push for omnichannel retail. Parcel companies are looking to optimize their flows with item-level tracking (Amazon and UPS are two major companies with ongoing initiatives in this space, while others are actively assessing solutions). At the same time, 3PLs are increasingly encouraged by their partners to modernize infrastructure for better receiving, handling, picking, and dispatch processes. Poolers like Jettainer and the International Food Container Organization  (IFCO) also want to optimize the flow of their Rate Transient Analyses (RTAs)—the critical asset their businesses rely on. Brambles, the leading global RTA pooler, has demonstrated the way with this, and smaller companies are starting to follow suit.

There is clearly promise in the market, but it is doubtful that Trackonomy will remain in this segment alone. Other markets, such as retail, have also seen significant investments in logistics automation and are closely related to Trackonomy’s business. The pharmaceutical industry is similarly adjacent to Trackonomy’s current focus areas, with an interest in item-level serialization and enhancing automation processes. We can expect to see more from Trackonomy in these areas over the next 24 months.

Trackonomy has charted an interesting course that has started to yield significant results. There are considerations from this innovative company’s journey that other technology suppliers should ponder. While great opportunities present themselves, these technology suppliers have important decisions to make.

• Visibility providers have generally struggled to provide value (and show clear revenue trajectories) from providing only location-based analytics. Evolving toward data-agnostic, item-level, real-time process automation engines is a promising direction.
• Fleet and asset tracking have generally occupied separate worlds, partly because fleet technology suppliers have limited experience or knowledge in selling tracking technologies. Point solutions are giving way to end-to-end solutions, in particular as mobile gateways (and RF energizers for battery-free labels) are increasingly installed in fleet vehicles.
• The smart labels market is fast-growing, as the second half of 2025 in particular has demonstrated. Silicon vendors should be aware of the volumes involved in this market and start competing as volumes scale with early adopters, trickling down to Tier 2 and 3 suppliers.
• RFID vendors should look to lead the Bluetooth® label ecosystem, relying on their existing relationships and their flexible label printing capabilities. Bluetooth® labels will initially enhance their portfolio, allowing them to offer more sensing capabilities alongside RFID’s ID-only scans; they will also safeguard against a less clear future where complementarity between RFID and Bluetooth® labels starts to break down.
• Energy harvesting is on its way. While PV designs dominate today, there is more promise in RF technologies than even a couple of years ago; suppliers can use high-ROI applications like those enabled by smart labels to infiltrate a business with energizing hardware, before replacing the broader sensor footprint (e.g., Electronic Shelf Labels (ESLs), building management sensors, etc.) with battery-free devices. Suppliers should note, however, that energy harvesting will primarily be effective as a way of reducing the cost of devices—not as an inherent differentiator in itself.