Wiliot, which is developing IoT chips powered by ambient radio frequencies, raises $200M Series C led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 as it plans an SaaS pivot
Context & Ripple Effects
Wiliot has been building battery-free IoT chips powered by ambient radio frequencies since its $30M Series B in 2019, which brought in strategic backers AWS and Samsung at a reported ~$120M post-money valuation. The new $200M round — more than six times the size of that Series B — is led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 rather than chip-industry strategics, and comes alongside a declared plan to restructure around an SaaS business model.
The raise lands mid-wave in connected-device funding: two weeks earlier Ray Ozzie's Blues Wireless pulled a $22M Series A for a $49 cellular connectivity chip, and months later security-focused IoT service Afero closed a $50M Series C. Capital is flowing to both ends of the IoT stack — cheap radios and the software layers above them.
First-order effects
- Vision Fund 2 becomes the lead backer of a hardware startup whose roadmap is explicitly a pivot away from chip sales toward recurring software revenue, putting SoftBank behind the business-model transition rather than the silicon itself.
- AWS and Samsung, the strategic investors from the 2019 Series B, now share the cap table with a financial sponsor whose check size implies Wiliot will spend heavily before the SaaS model proves out.
Second-order effects
- Rivals selling low-cost connectivity hardware — Blues Wireless' $49 cellular chip being the freshest example — face a competitor that no longer needs to win on unit price, since Wiliot intends to monetize devices after deployment through subscriptions.
- The pivot moves Wiliot's competitive set from chipmakers toward IoT platform and software vendors like Afero and Armis, forcing those players to differentiate on data value rather than device count.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, IoT economics migrate from selling silicon per unit to harvesting recurring fees from fleets of disposable, battery-free tags — with mega-fund capital accelerating hardware companies' conversion into software businesses and blurring the line between semiconductor vendor and SaaS provider.
- A funding structure where financial sponsors out-check chip strategics suggests the industry's center of gravity shifts toward whoever owns the post-deployment data relationship, not whoever manufactures the radio.
The trend: Connected-device companies are shifting from selling connectivity hardware to subscription-based data and software revenue, with large financial sponsors like SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 underwriting the hardware-to-SaaS migration.