RFiD Discovery energises its industrial RTLS tracking solutions with acquisition of UWINLOC
RFiD Discovery is pleased to announce that its parent company Paragon ID has acquired UWINLOC, an award-winning French provider of indoor and outdoor tracking solutions which use their pioneering energy harvesting technology to deliver systems with batteryless Ultra-Wideband (UWB) tags and minimal infrastructure.
The acquisition will enable RFiD Discovery to enhance its asset and inventory tracking solutions for industrial markets with a Real Time Location System (RTLS) which eliminates the need for tag batteries. This will allow the company to offer more environmentally friendly real-time tracking solutions at a lower cost without compromising on location accuracy.
Bringing down the cost of real-time tracking technology
Based in Toulouse, France, UWINLOC was founded in 2015 with the goal to provide integrated IoT technology for smart and efficient management of assets and inventory in warehouses and outdoor storage areas. With over 30 customers and a presence in five countries, the company provides accurate real-time location solutions using forklift mounted readers and eliminating the need for fixed infrastructure.
UWINLOC holds over 20 patents including those centred around energy harvesting technology to enable UWB tags to function without battery. This means that UWB tags can be provided at a substantially lower cost, making accurate tracking technologies feasible for a wider range of items including lower value inventory and assets.
Integrating functionality
UWINLOC’s MahVis system for the location visualisation of materials handling processes perfectly complements RFiD Discovery’s existing product offering for the industrial sector.
The plan is to integrate the MahVis solution with RFiD Discovery’s existing TrackSphereTM software, a complete Iocation-tracking platform, able to support all available technologies and provide solutions suited to a wide spectrum of industrial applications. The resulting system will simplify the implementation of forklift tracking solutions.
TrackSphereTM was originally developed by Tracktio, a Spanish-based technology company, which through acquisition became part of RFiD Discovery in July 2022. The software, which is also available as Software as a Service (SaaS), is designed to be white labelled, no-code configurable and API-expandable. It is ideally suited to applications within the manufacturing, construction, logistics and other industrial sectors and can use data from a wide range of tracking technologies such as active and passive RFID, Wi-Fi, GPS, BLE, LoRa, UWB, Quuppa and optical identification.
Over the past 15 years RFiD Discovery solutions have been adopted in many healthcare and industrial environments including by over 100 hospitals as well as a wide range of industrial businesses, in the UK, France and beyond.
Arron Duddin, Smart Solutions Director at RFiD Discovery, said:
“We are delighted to welcome UWINLOC as part of our growing RFiD Discovery team. The acquisition will help us enhance our existing tracking capabilities for intralogistics and production environments. Removing the need for fixed infrastructure will simplify the implementation of forklift-based tracking solutions for both our customers and global partner network.
“We are particularly excited about being able to provide accurate real-time tracking solutions without the need for battery-powered tags, taking away cost barriers to expanding systems and making our solutions more sustainable.”
Cassandre Le Corre, Sales Director at UWINLOC, commented:
“Becoming part of RFiD Discovery with its excellent reputation and growing customer and partner base offers a fantastic opportunity for UWINLOC to build on our ground-breaking technology solutions with additional investment and the backing from a global company.
“We look forward to working with the RFiD Discovery team with the goal of integrating our solutions and bringing new technological advances to our customers.”