Impinj: 25 Years of Bringing Value to the World
For the past quarter-century, Impinj has been providing full item lifecycle traceability through a wireless, serialized barcode. See how Impinj people, partners, and technologies have made Impinj the most trusted RAIN RFID partner in the industry.
Impinj started back in 2000 as a tiny team focused on connecting every thing. Today, 25 years later, Impinj is realizing that mission by connecting more than 120 billion items worldwide and delivering ground-breaking products that give enterprises visibility into every item they manufacture, transport, and sell. This video captures Impinj’s journey, from pioneering the Gen2 standard to shaping the future of supply chains, sustainability, and intelligent systems.
Video Transcript
Think about what we’re doing. We are going to connect everything and provide trust for people in every one of those connections. We’re innovating, we’re inventing, we’re creating, we’re developing — and we’re just getting going.
This little speck of silicon is one of our tag chips. They transform into a label or tag that is applied to an object, allowing us or a corporation to track that object through their supply chains or through the lifetime of the object.
We tag over a billion units a week now, as an industry. And those tags are going on everyday items.
The goal of what we do is to provide full item lifecycle traceability through what is effectively a wireless, serialized barcode.
People love our technology because that insight always allows them to help reduce excesses, reduce waste, and be able to further optimize the value that the companies are delivering.
We started Impinj 25 years ago. We’ve grown the company to about 450 employees, IPO’d in 2016, multibillion-dollar valuation today. The confidence in what we were doing was the most important thing — and the trust that we all had in each other that, you know what? We were going to get this thing done.
Back in 2000, the goal was to make the world a better place. And here we are, 25 years later. We’ve created an atmosphere of for learning, and trust, and collaboration.
Impinj was there from beginning of the development of our over-the-air protocol. It has led to international adoption of our technology.
Today, the M800 is our latest and greatest in that it has the highest performance of any endpoint IC out there. And then Gen2X is essentially us extending that even further.
It’s a staggering change in a very short period of time, and it make it so exciting to see what our future could be — because we still have only scratched the surface of the potential of this technology.
What I’m really excited about in the future is embedded tags and consumer mobile reading of those tags. We believe that there is a return on investment in terms of carbon, in terms of sustainability. Our technology is unlocking that circularity.
I think the next 25 years is going to be even more spectacular than the first 25.
At Impinj, we’ve always cared about people. And people is what make our culture.
Trust is a very important word at Impinj.
We have enterprises — major Fortune 100 enterprises — that trust our products. We have enterprises that trust our people. We engender trust in those customers. And we trust each other within the company to do what’s best for our customers and for each other.
To me, the greatest compliment you can get is when your customer or your partner tells you, “We love working with you because you understand us and our problems, and you’re solving our problems — you’re not trying to sell us a problem.” We’ve seen companies change their production mindsets, we’ve seen companies change their distribution networks, we’ve seen companies change how they handle inventory, we’ve seen companies change what they build in response to the insights that our technology has generated. We do it in service of the customer, of the end enterprise, of the business.
We want to put a smile on the face of the enterprise, and we do whatever it takes to make that happen.
For 25 years, what drove most if not all our innovation was a curiosity of asking “What if?” What if this idea would be true? What if we could actually do this? So I can only imagine what the next 25 years will bring for us, and for our ability to solve our customers’ problems, and for Impinj.
I believe my number one job as CEO is to give every employee at the company the opportunity to be wildly successful. And I believe every employee’s job is to enable our customers to be wildly successful. Because if our customers are wildly successful, we can’t help but be wildly successful.
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Monday, May 12, 2025
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