SAN DIEGO, CA – October 15, 2026 – Wiliot, a global leader in Physical AI for supply chains, and Thinaer, an industry leading provider of Physical AI infrastructure and software, today announced a partnership to bring secure, real-time asset visibility to the defense industrial base. The collaboration begins with a Thinaer deployment at a major U.S. aerospace and defense manufacturer serving the Department of Defense (DoD), tracking critical materials and parts throughout its internal supply chain.
Thinaer will begin deploying 1.7 million Wiliot IoT Pixels in Q1 2027 at the first customer’s operations, establishing a foundation for broader adoption across the defense industrial base.
The partnership also marks Wiliot’s entry into defense following scaled deployments across retail, post and parcel, logistics, and food and beverage. It extends Physical AI to complex defense manufacturing operations, where continuous asset visibility can help keep critical production programs on schedule.
Within these operations, materials and parts can undergo ten or more transformations as they move between locations, including temporary external facilities. Losing visibility between production stages can leave teams searching for critical components and put production schedules at risk. Tracking those movements continuously helps manufacturers understand where materials have stalled and intervene before delays spread across the operation.
“True Physical AI closes the gap between raw material and intelligent action. When every object on the factory floor is ambiently connected, the floor becomes a dynamic, self-navigating ecosystem where materials communicate their own state, location, and operational readiness to the systems and humans moving them,” said Bryan Merckling, CEO of Thinaer. “Wiliot IoT Pixels’ combination of size, cost, and battery-free operation lets us connect far more of those materials to the ‘Connect Everything’ layer of our Physical AI platform.”
Wiliot IoT Pixels are stamp-sized, battery-free Bluetooth sensors that attach to materials, parts, or containers to aggregate real-time location data. Wiliot’s Physical AI platform processes this data into asset-level insights that Thinaer integrates with information from its broader sensor infrastructure.
Together, these inputs give defense teams a shared view of operations across facilities to track asset movements, identify bottlenecks, and address delays. They also provide AI systems with the physical-world context needed to anticipate disruptions and keep production on schedule.
Protecting that operational data is central to the joint solution. Wiliot IoT Pixels transmit encrypted data that remains protected during collection and relay until it reaches the processing environment behind secure firewalls. Thinaer’s platform operates in government secure cloud environments, including Impact Level 5 environments, bringing established security infrastructure to the partnership’s defense applications.
“Defense manufacturers need continuous insight into their operations and control over the sensitive information those operations generate,” said Alex Sliwinski, Wiliot Vice President of Sales. “Encrypted data at the asset level is fundamental to serving this market. With Thinaer, we can put that data to work securely across the materials and parts on which defense production depends.”
With a roadmap to millions of tracked assets, the first deployment establishes a foundation for broader adoption of Physical AI across defense manufacturing. Thinaer has already identified additional customers for the joint solution, while its work in healthcare and other industrial markets provides opportunities to extend the partnership beyond defense.