Wireless Power: The End of Wi-Charge

In an emotional Linkedin post, Wi-Charge founder and CEO Ori Mor announced the end of the Israeli startup after more than 14 years of development work. Wi-Charge set out to solve a challenge that has frustrated both consumers and technology vendors for decades: eliminating power cables. Using a proprietary combination of transmitters, receivers and optical wireless power technology, the company was able to deliver energy over several meters, enabling small devices to operate without wired power connections.

Infrared: Wireless Power for Signage

A technology milestone without market breakthrough

According to Mor, Wi-Charge achieved what dozens of startups and major technology companies failed to commercialize. The company successfully brought room-scale wireless power to market and deployed products with leading brands across the United States.

“We started this company with a belief that power should move through the air; no cables, just power, wherever you need it,” Mor wrote in his farewell post. “We didn’t know if it could be done, but we knew that if it could be done, it would be done by us.”

The CEO points to several achievements that demonstrate the viability of the technology. Wi-Charge products were reportedly deployed across 39 US states, while OEM bundles achieved adoption rates of up to 90 percent. Direct-to-consumer products generated take rates of more than 20 percent, suggesting that customers appreciated the convenience of cable-free power delivery.

For the digital signage sector, Wi-Charge’s technology offered a compelling proposition. Small shelf-edge displays, electronic labels and IoT devices could be installed without costly electrical infrastructure, simplifying deployments and allowing greater flexibility in store design.

The chicken-and-egg problem of wireless power

Despite its technological success, Wi-Charge never reached the scale required for sustainable growth. Mor identifies two fundamental challenges that ultimately limited adoption.

The first was the classic platform dilemma. Wireless power requires both transmitters and receivers. Device manufacturers showed interest in integrating receivers, but often only once a sufficiently large installed base of transmitters existed. At the same time, widespread deployment of transmitters depended on compatible devices being available.

“The technology works 100 percent. We’re happy to add receivers once transmitters are already out there,” was a typical response from OEM partners, according to Mor.

The second challenge was less technical and more behavioral. Charging batteries is inconvenient, but for most consumers it is not a pressing problem. As Mor puts it, wireless power proved to be a “vitamin rather than a painkiller” – a product that improves convenience but does not solve an urgent need.

Hardware remains a difficult business

Wi-Charge also faced headwinds familiar to many hardware startups. Long product cycles, expensive manufacturing requirements and relatively slow market adoption made the company less attractive to venture capital investors compared with software-driven businesses.

“Slow adoption, plus being hardware and consumer as a vertical, made it undesired for investors,” Mor wrote.

The company therefore found itself in a difficult position: pioneering a category-defining technology outside the technology hype cycles that typically attract funding and accelerate ecosystem development.

Legacy beyond the shutdown

While Wi-Charge is closing its doors, the company leaves behind an important proof point for the broader wireless power industry. It demonstrated that room-scale wireless energy transmission can move beyond laboratory demonstrations into real-world commercial deployments.

For retail technology and digital signage professionals, the shutdown is a reminder that technical innovation alone does not guarantee market success. Even technologies with clear operational advantages must overcome ecosystem barriers, deployment costs and user behavior before reaching mass adoption.

Wi-Charge may never have achieved the commercial breakthrough its founders envisioned, but after 14 years of development the company proved one thing: power can travel through the air. The digital signage industry will continue its search for truly cable-free solutions. For now, however, it remains dependent on power delivery via AV infrastructures such as HDBaseT or network technologies like Power over Ethernet (PoE). Both reduce cabling requirements, but neither eliminates cables altogether. The vision of wireless power, however, remains very much alive.